Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)

We are very bad in this country, across all political parties, at infrastructure planning. We are horrendous at it. It is shameful because we are letting down the people. When it comes to infrastructure, there is no long-term planning. The national planning framework is a dog's dinner. The national development plan is loaded with aspirations and projects that often do not materialise and it contains, in various aspects, the token political whims of a number of people in government. We are not very good at this.

On 27 April 2016, I predicted in this House that we would have infrastructural issues with water and waste. That was more than nine years ago. We have failed in this regard. The Minister of State stated that investment in this area has gone from €300 million to €1.4 billion. He did not mention that the problem is that the amount of money going in initially over those years was bloody well ridiculous and we have been playing catch-up ever since. It is a failure of this House, a failure of politics and a failure of government. There are towns and cities all over this country that are hamstrung because it takes years for this investment to reach a development status whereby houses can be built. In my town of Nenagh, more than 1,000 houses are planned but we must wait for a plant that was meant to be built for 2027 but will not be done until 2028. This is happening all across the country. I have another prediction, which will not take nine years to come to pass. We will have water shortages in this city, possibly this year, and we will have infrastructural issues to do with waste that will go on for decades. If we are depending on the famous pipeline that is coming from the River Shannon, we will be waiting a long time because that is what it will take.

Are Uisce Éireann's response rates, the way in which it deals with people, its servicing, etc. all up the level they should be? No; not a hope of it. I am as frustrated as everybody else by this. The reality is that Uisce Éireann has not been funded. Anyone who says anything different is not telling the truth. It has not been funded to deal with the infrastructural gaps that exist across the country, and the Government is going to bloody well pay for it. It does not have a prayer of building the houses necessary because of the failure of politics over the past decade or so to deal with this infrastructural issue. That is the reality. Nothing the Government can do now will fast-forward the process and deal with the issues, whether it is the Mickey Mouse housing unit in the Department of housing or the infrastructure unit in the Department of public expenditure. It is totally tokenistic rubbish and an absolute waste of time. It is already over. The time to fix things is gone. We can throw Apple money at the problem but it will not deal with it fast enough. This will be the rock upon which the Government perishes.

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