Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

No, I am not suspicious. I can just see the facts for myself, as can everyone else, including the builders. Even they are saying this. We cannot deliver the necessary housing. Cairn Homes has said it. Goodbody Stockbrokers have said it. Builders do not have the capacity. By the way, they are not in the business of producing subsidised housing. They do not do that. What they are delivering is unaffordable, but let them away. We need social and affordable housing and the State has to have the capacity to do that, since private developers are not going to do it.

We used to have tradespeople in our local authority, but it has run them down, as have local authorities all over the country. Why are apprentices and tradespeople not being recruited into local authorities? At a time when we are facing a housing emergency, why would we not ramp that up so that we could have the State construction capacity to supplement the market failure we are seeing and compensate for the incapacity of the private sector to deliver on the scale we need?

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