Joe Conway (Independent)

Is mian liom dul i gcomhluadar leis an Seanadóir Fitzpatrick nuair a bhí sí ag déanamh tagairt ar an bplean nua tithíochta atá foilsithe ag an Rialtas ar maidin. Delivering Homes, Building Communities is the plan being delivered and published today to give us all some hope about the dire straits in which people looking for housing find themselves. We know it all too well. Every organ of the media and every person you meet in the street who talks to a politician will say the homelessness situation is pretty dire.Those of us who have children in that age bracket know only too well that they have to go through awful struggles to get on the housing ladder, as it is referred to. Only last Friday I had the pleasure of walking around building sites and housing projects in Tramore with the Minister for housing, Deputy James Browne, and a grand man he is to be in the company of. We were talking about the big challenges there are for housing. In this plan, I wish him and his Government, and all his colleagues and everybody who is associated with the housing challenge the very best. I hope they attain all their objectives but I have serious misgivings. I do not think there is a person in this Chamber today who believes we are going to deliver 300,000 houses by 2030. Be that as it may, I want to address a couple of things I have noticed. As Mayor of Waterford and as a councillor I have been on a lot of building sites over the last couple of years and I noticed a couple of things. One is that I have yet to see a woman working on a building site. Second, in IPAS at the moment we have roughly 30,000 people. One in four of those are children, so we can take those out of the equation. That leaves over 20,000 people who are technically employable. Unfortunately, the access to the labour market is denied to these people for six months. A lot of people in IPAS want to work. I ask the Government to reduce the six-month bar on an IPAS resident back to three months so if they want to work they can get cracking at those building sites more quickly. We should have a national campaign to encourage women to work on building sites. They do it when they go out to Australia; there is no reason they should not be doing it here. That is just a couple of practical measures.