Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

When this matter was originally being considered for approval in this House, it was to be discussed without debate. I apologise because I was partly responsible for asking for the matter to be debated. The reason was that I believe there are wider issues at stake. I agree completely with Senator Ahearn in that the rates in question are not surprising and probably below the market level in many instances. Therefore, the economic effect of this order is probably likely to be minimal. The point I want to raise is a slightly wider one, however.

Last week I went for a walk from my house in Ranelagh to Grand Canal Basin and saw the immense amount of work being done on office developments. Huge holes are being dug in the ground and there are huge girder frameworks being put up. I wondered whether, between that work and the infrastructural work contemplated by the Government, we have major supply constraints related to skilled building workers that will collectively impede the State's capacity to build the amount of housing the Taoiseach has mentioned, namely a quarter of a million houses, which is the deficit. The fundamental point concerns what we can do. I am aware the Government has announced the temporary relaxation of development levies and subsidies and grants for home construction in certain areas. However, we have to face up to the fact that, when digging to build a metro – I still hope it will not go ahead – and when all such things happen, we will need a large number of construction workers, skilled artisans and their like to meet society's construction needs. Our population has risen from 3.9 million to 5.1 million and we have elaborate plans for social expenditure.

The Georgian ambassador became an almost-semipermanent fixture in this House a few weeks ago when we were talking about Georgian migration and people coming here from Georgia without documentation. He and I had a very useful discussion in which he said Ireland is offering construction workers, if they can get going in Ireland, five to ten times as much as they would earn in Georgia. Two points occurred to me in this regard. Since I believe the ambassador was right in saying we need the workers, we need pathways for them to meet our needs. There was a time – it is probably unfashionable to mention it – when workers from Turkey, which obviously now has its own construction needs, and companies like Gama were filling in the gap in our capacity to meet our domestic construction employment needs. The Government will have to consider new migration policies to facilitate the migration into Ireland of construction workers. It will also have to examine the role of those who are coming to Ireland as economic migrants, properly or improperly, and ask whether they should not be allowed to work to fulfil our needs.I was a little bit surprised that this order was to set minimum levels at the levels they were because I thought that if you were a Dublin city centre building contractor, you would be very lucky to get people to work for you at these rates. I fully accept they are not intended to be a ceiling but a floor. There is a wider issue about the promises politicians are making - I am not making a party political point - about 250,000 extra homes, about underground railways, and about projects anyone might wish to name, and how these can be achieved in the context of a complete undersupply of employee capacity in the construction sector. We have to think slightly outside the box again to work out how migrant labour is needed to fulfil what are very urgent needs in our society. That is why I sought this debate.