I apologise to my colleague. I was on the wrong clock and I was thinking, "He has gone a minute over time" but he was within time. He will be looking back at the video asking, "What was your man doing there behind me?" I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on this. The Minister and Minister of State, Deputies Browne and O'Donnell, are two good men leading the Department. This plan is ambitious and I want it to succeed. Everyone wants it to succeed; the country needs it to succeed. There will be 300,000 new homes over the lifetime of the plan, major investment in water, energy and transport with over €9 billion committed to housing alone in 2026. The plan is good, the money behind it is good but how it is delivered is what we will really be tested on here. I am concerned we may not have the workforce to do this. I have said many times that we need to follow the lead of countries like Australia and Canada where there are specific visas to bring back tradespeople that are domiciled overseas, as well as tradespeople from other countries, to work in their countries to help build houses and other critical infrastructure. We need to have such a policy. We have critical work visas for urban town planners and architects but we have no critical work visas for the people who build. We have all the people who will design houses, talk about them and engineer their way through a solution but nobody to actually build, plumb and wire them. They are the people I would like to see in this country, whether they are Irish people enticed to come home or people from other countries with skills we need here. I would really like to happen. I also want to mention the villages of Broadford and Cooraclare in County Clare. They have been funded for two years today to have sewerage schemes. More money was topped up last week but we do not see it happening quick enough. That needs to happen. I am looking for the Minister's intervention at this time, two years on, to get the logjams moving. I hope Deputy Coppinger is up in her office watching the TV. She might come down later and answer why in 2020 she objected to 211 apartments in Clonsilla, not just apartments but homes for families. She can throw her little grenades in this Chamber and get nice little clips for TikTok but it does damn all to house families. Speaking of grenades, the objection fee is €20. I own a farm and I applied for planning permission to build on it but a solicitor in Ranelagh, for €20, objected to that and blew it apart. That is not right. In the same spirit, what Deputy Coppinger did in Clonsilla was not right. If someone is going to object to something, the fee should be commensurate with the actual cost of the project. There has to be something more than a €20 fee for holding up a Clonsilla apartment block worth millions of euro that would have housed 211 families. There has to be an equal playing field.
Sentiment score: 0.15
She is a serial objector.
Sentiment score: 0.00
Will the Deputy rejoin us?
Sentiment score: 0.00
Will the Deputy rejoin us?
Sentiment score: 0.00
That sounds like a rejoining speech.
Sentiment score: 0.36