Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I second the Senator's amendment.

On jobs growth in Ireland, we are entering challenging times with Brexit coming down the road and it is good news to see the announcement of new jobs. For instance, this morning Voxpro announced 400 new jobs in Cork. The company started off in Cork with a small number of staff. It was built by people from Cork and it now employs more than 3,000 people in Cork and Dublin. Overall it has more than 5,000 employees. That started off with two or three people and it has now grown substantially. It shows the positive way in which the economy has been managed over the past seven years because, despite the threat of Brexit people, feel confident that they can invest in new jobs in Ireland.

There are many challenges in Dublin because of the cost of accommodation and the cost of setting up but Cork is an attractive place for companies to locate in. For example, 1 Albert Quay is a building that has been completed beside the railway station and it accommodates more than 1,700 office workers. When all the other projects are completed in the area, there will be more than 10,000 people working in offices within five minutes walking distance of the train station in Cork, which shows the confidence that people have in the region. One of the challenges that we now need to deal with is to make sure that we have adequate residential accommodation for those people who want to take up employment in Cork. We need to work on that area. One of the significant complaints at the moment relates to residential accommodation. The cost of building apartments is way in excess of what can be recovered from their sale. I call on the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government to come to the House to debate what we can do to help deal with that issue and to make sure that building apartments for this new spurt in population is a viable proposition and that they can be built in a timely manner.