Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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14. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [26830/24]

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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15. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [27945/24]

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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16. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [27949/24]

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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17. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [27974/24]

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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18. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [28199/24]

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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19. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [28202/24]

Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats)
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20. To ask the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on economy and investment will next meet. [28144/24]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 14 to 20, inclusive, together.

The Cabinet committee on the economy and investment was re-established by the Government on 10 April and most recently met on Monday, 1 July. The next meeting of that Cabinet committee has not yet been scheduled. Membership of the committee comprises me, the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and for Defence, the Ministers for the Environment, Climate and Communications and Transport, Finance, Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Other Ministers or Ministers of State are invited to participate as required. The committee oversees the implementation of programme for Government commitments aimed at sustainable economic recovery, investment and job creation, including Harnessing Digital, our national digital strategy.

Despite many external challenges, we continue to see a very strong economic performance from the economy, with more people at work than ever before, low levels of unemployment and, thankfully, a return this year to real wage growth. Inflation continues to fall while households and businesses have been supported through the cost-of-living crisis. The Government remains committed to continuing to support people through that crisis. Our economic model continues to be founded on a well-established and successful pro-enterprise policy framework, providing a stable and sustainable regulatory and tax environment, with sound management of the public finances and significant investment in the infrastructure and skills required to ensure our future competitiveness.

As with all policy areas, economic issues are not just discussed at the Cabinet committee, but regularly at full Government meetings, where all formal decisions are made.

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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I received the Taoiseach’s correspondence.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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About water?

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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Yes, with a reply attached from the chief executive officer of Uisce Éireann on the issue of discoloured water in Cork city, so I thank the Taoiseach for that. However, the correspondence does not include what the Taoiseach promised to get for me, that being, a timescale for the resolution of the problem. The correspondence names mid-November as a target date for the completion of a number of local flushing programmes, but local flushing only lessens the problem, and then only temporarily. It does not solve it.

The correspondence indicates that a major part of the problem is the fact that more than 50% of the Cork water mains system is cast iron and 100 or more years old. According to the correspondence, replacing the system would require an investment of €500 million across several decades. I hope to God that the chief executive officer of Uisce Éireann is not telling the people of Cork that it is going to take decades to solve this problem. Is it?

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I received a letter from BD, or Becton, Dickinson and Company, which is a global medtech company with an operation in Drogheda. I believe this issue was raised with the Taoiseach earlier. Deputy Munster and I were contacted and I spoke to Councillor Joanna Byrne about the matter. There is a great deal of shock and fear in Drogheda and other parts of County Louth. BD plans to cease and exit operations in Drogheda by the end of quarter 4 2026. A consequence of this decision is the possibility of redundancies at the Drogheda site. The company has entered into a redundancy consultation process with its workforce of 170 people and their representatives. It goes without saying that we are asking for full State engagement in this somewhat disastrous situation. Is there any possibility of a row back? We are asking for complete support for the workers and their families.

We need to examine the tech and pharma sectors, including medtech. There have been job losses, so we at least need to prepare ourselves for further losses. This is a major blow to Drogheda specifically. I hope that IDA Ireland will be involved in finding new operations. I have spoken with representatives of PayPal and many other companies that have experienced job losses over the past while. We in County Louth need to see the reverse happening soon.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The issue of housing is not only responsible for untold hardship, anxiety and suffering for large numbers of people who are at the wrong end of the housing crisis, but it is also probably the greatest economic problem we now face, and increasingly so. We cannot recruit teachers because they cannot afford to live in places like Dublin. We cannot recruit enough health workers because they cannot afford to pay rents or hope to buy homes. Many of our young people coming out of university are leaving the country because they do not believe they have the prospect of ever owning their own homes or affording these rents.

The ESRI has produced a report that states the Government has to dramatically increase its housing targets. I hope there is finally an acknowledgement from the Government that that is the case. However, the main question is not whether we will increase output, which we have to do, but whether that output will be affordable. When considering what has happened on Oscar Traynor Road, I am fearful about what will happen at Shanganagh and Cherrywood in terms of affordable housing. Where the latter is concerned, we still do not know how many houses we will get, whether they will be affordable, etc. The policy of delivering affordable housing or even cost-rental housing is not working because the private developers we are relying on or the market benchmarks we are using are incapable of delivering affordability. When will the Government cop on and see that the State, through its own construction company or capacity, has to build housing on a not-for-profit basis that is genuinely affordable and sufficient to address the chronic waiting lists?

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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I wish to raise the issue of investment in our sewerage infrastructure. I have raised this issue previously, but I encountered two new cases of it while campaigning in the local elections, one in Alderwood Grove and the other in Glenview Park, both of which are in Tallaght. I presume there are hundreds of such cases across the country whereby people have raw sewage coming out through manholes in their back gardens because the system is such that there is a private pipe from houses to the public sewerage line and, if there is a blockage further up the road or, as in Glenview Park’s case, too many new housing developments have been connected to one pipe, the house at the bottom of the line suffers raw sewage flooding up into its back garden when there is a great deal of rain or usage. The issue in all of these cases is that they cannot get to the bottom of who is responsible and who will deal with the problem.

They go to the council and it says that it is a private matter and that it is nothing to do with it. They go to Irish Water and it says again that it is not to do with it. These people are not capable of dealing with the problem. The problem exists off their property, outside of their sewerage line. It is up the line where either too many properties have been connected or a neighbour up the road is putting in items such as nappies, wipes or whatever, in the toilet, should not be doing so, which is then causing a blockage. This is a serious problem and it is being exacerbated by the kind of offloading of the responsibility mostly from the council to Irish Water. A situation now exists in every one of these circumstances where each one points to the other and no one takes responsibility.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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Dirty water, foul water, sewerage, local flushing, a Thaoisigh, these are the sorts of questions that are being raised. I ask for his response, please.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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These all dominate the Cabinet committee on the economy but, these are all, nonetheless, serious issues and I do not doubt that. I am just still getting used to where the questions start and where the issues go but I will do my best on these issues.

First, in reply to Deputy Barry, and my now weekly exchange in what is a genuinely serious issue, I am nearly as invested in the issue as he is at this stage because he has brought it to my attention on quite a few times. I passed on the letter and I thank him for acknowledging that. I have also written a follow-up letter to the CEO asking that I be kept informed on the next steps. On a serious point, I will push for a timeline. I am not a spokesperson for Uisce Éireann but my understanding is that it is not talking about decades before there are solutions but to just give people an honest view of the scale of work that will be required to replace the cast-iron pipe network. That is not to say that nothing is going to happen in the here and now and, indeed, in the interim. It is not an unfair point to ask for a continued timeline and I will pursue that. I welcome some of the work that has been done by Uisce Éireann and I get a sense from its correspondence that there is a high level of awareness on this.

I will make a broader point to both Deputies Barry and Murphy on the issue of raw sewerage in manholes in back gardens. It is a horrific situation. I see it in my own constituency from time to time also and it is an awful thing to happen. If there are children, pets or anything in the garden, it is an horrifically distressing situation for people.

It does all point to the need to invest a great deal more in the water network. We all agree on that, even if we might have debates on how best to do that. I am hopeful that the Government will be able to make some concrete decisions shortly to increase levels of public investment through Uisce Éireann in some basic infrastructure. How that gets played out in specific schemes will be a matter for Uisce Éireann but there is a real need to invest a hell of a lot more in our water and sewerage network as well and I will take away the points made by Deputy Murphy on Tallaght.

Turning to Deputy Ó Murchú, I thank him for raising the issue around BD. I assure the Deputy that the full State supports will be available. I will work with the Deputy and colleagues in Louth on this issue and my immediate thoughts, as I know are the Deputy's, are with the workers and their families. There is a broader conversation that we should and want to have on Drogheda and how we can continue to support it to be the enterprising town with employment that it wants to be. It is such a large town and wants to be a city. We are ambitious for it as well.

Turning to Deputy Boyd Barrett, while we will not have time for a full debate on affordable housing on this occasion, the Government has taken a number of actions to try to address the issue of affordability. I believe that supply, supply and supply is the key because I believe in demand and supply and I believe that as one increases supply, that has a positive effects on demand and, over time, on price. We have also brought in a number of schemes and incentives that help with the price somebody actually pays for the house, as opposed to the headline price, be they the help-to-buy or the first home schemes, as two examples. We obviously have social housing schemes where we have had the largest number of such houses given out last year since the 1970s. That can be seen them right across every county, including in Deputy Boyd Barrett's own county. We also have direct affordable housing schemes.

For example a three-bed duplex under a Government affordable housing scheme in the south County Dublin area that is available for €299,000. There is a three-bed home in Mulhuddart for €320,000 and a three-bed house in Kilbarry, Waterford for €284,000, which is a stone's throw away from our newest university. Nyne Park in Kilkenny has a three-bed home available from €255,000 and in the same city, Abbey Meadows has a four-bed home available for €284,000. Cork city's White Cross has three-bedroom homes available for €316,000. I give these as some examples because often outliers are referred to in this House but these are some examples of the affordable housing schemes we have in place.