Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)

I congratulate the Minister of State on his appointment. The revision of the national development plan is supposedly to accelerate the delivery of housing in particular. There are a couple of things needed to accelerate that. The first is the need to replicate existing plans so the same plan for social and affordable housing and other houses can be used in Waterford, Laois or Donegal. The private sector is doing this. If we look at what it is building, it is replicating the plans all over the country. However, what is happening with local government and Government-sponsored housing is that it is back to a blank canvas every time. It is costing between 10% and 15% more to build houses and it is slowing it down. The Department in the Custom House is micromanaging the local authorities and it needs to stop. I have told previous Ministers that and I am telling Deputy Cummins that as the new Minister of State. That is the first thing.

The second is that we need builders, in particular small builders. The Minister of State knows that in rural towns and villages, small builders need the low-cost finance that is available to the larger builders. We also need to accelerate the apprenticeship programmes.

We need to stop micromanaging the local authorities with regard to social, affordable and cost-rental housing. Infrastructural deficits need to be addressed, particularly the infrastructural deficits in water supply. I ask the Minister of State to think about this. His constituency counterpart, Phil Hogan, created Irish Water.

I was Opposition spokesperson on that at the time. I argued with him about it over several days. The Minister of State knows the difficulties in trying to deal with Irish Water. Money needs to be given directly to local authorities to put in the infrastructure into small towns such as Mountmellick, Mountrath, Rathdowney, Graiguecullen, Ballylynan, Portarlington and Abbeyleix. Many of them are connected by rail so they are very easy to get around. We need the infrastructure to go into those towns. We need to get the foot off local authorities and stop micromanagement of them. We need to use the same plans throughout the Twenty-six Counties in trying to rapidly build up and speed up delivery. If you want to quickly produce something that is good quality, you mass produce. That is what we need to do.

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