James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)

I fully agree with the Deputy that MMC is critical to housing delivery in this country. When modular units were first proposed for schools, for example, there was a little bit of pushback from school principals, who were concerned as many of them had grown up with very poor prefabs and perhaps they thought that was what was coming. I was chair of a school board of management at the time, and when the modular building arrived, we saw the high quality of the build. School principals then raced to get them because they could be got at such speed.

A similar change of mindset is required for housing. It is the way forward. Our tradespeople are getting older and it is becoming more and more difficult to replace them, so if we want to build housing at scale, it must be done through modern methods of construction. One of the things the Government did today was to get agreement to end the four-stage process and reduce it to a single-stage process, but also to make it mandatory for local authorities to use a housing design manual from the Department of housing, which contains 60 designs. What that will also do is help those providing MMC across the country to know they can now scale up because there will be consistency of style specifications for the delivery of social housing throughout the country.

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