Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

-----Members to avail of this because we have a democratic mandate as well. There were a hundred issues that I would like to have raised last week but I got two minutes speaking time in the entire Dáil week to speak about legislation from the 1820 to the 1850 period. How irrelevant when I want to speak on topics like this. I am glad that anyone who is watching at home can look at the screen and see what is happening here today. We show up here every single day of every single week.

I will now speak to the matter we are debating. I put it to the Minister, Deputy Browne, that it is conceivable that in the next 12 months, many of the 112,000 Ukrainian war refugees who are in this country will go home when peace is brokered, whatever that peace deal looks like. It is important that when they go home, we immediately look at the 112,000 accommodation units they are taking up and look at bringing in people on work visas to backfill our construction sector. We are totally lacking people, particularly in the wet trades but also in skills like block laying. This is a huge impediment to getting houses. Imagine if we were to grant 112,000 work permits to people with skills to come into this country and build houses. Over many years we have sent trade missions overseas for the Irish dairy sector, the Irish beef sector or the tech and pharma sectors. It is time that our Ministers go overseas looking to bring in a workforce here that can backfill where we have shortages.

There is another important point, which others have mentioned in the course of today's debate. When I speak about County Clare we are not lacking in zoned land and road networks but the basic stuff we lack would be water and sewerage infrastructure, the very constraints that make housing very difficult to achieve and deliver. The Minister's Department has approved a pilot scheme. In County Clare we are waiting for schemes in Cooraclare and Broadford to progress. Will the Minister's Department push these forward? Without those schemes houses cannot be built. We are ready to house people in County Clare but we need the basic infrastructure. I thank the Minister.

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