At The Irish Times Business Awards on Thursday night, Taoiseach Micheál Martin stressed that he intends to move decisively on bringing private sector investment into the housing sector to ramp up completions from the current level of about 30,000 a year to the Government’s aspiration of 50,000 annually.
Describing it as the “social issue of our generation” he said the State could not carry all of the financial burden of delivering all of these new homes.
“What is important is that we need a proper debate, with less noise, less name-calling to work out the how of getting from 30,000 to 50,000 new homes annually,” he said. “And it needs private sector investment. The mere mention of that causes controversy in the Oireachtas, which surprises me.
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“It will need about €20 billion annually to get those 50,000 houses. So we have to simply work on attracting private sector investment into house building at an appreciable scale that will make the difference. There is no getting away from that.”
The Government has already hinted at changes to the rules around rent-pressure zones and suggested it will consider introducing tax incentives to house building.
His comments were no doubt music to the ears of those in the 300-strong gathering from the property sector.
Among the audience were Michael Stanley, chief executive of stock market listed company Cairn Homes, the country’s biggest housebuilder, veteran Cork developer Michael O’Flynn, and Pat Farrell, the chief executive of Irish Institutional Property, whose members include Ires Reit and Kennedy Wilson, two of the biggest private sector landlords in the country.
The Taoiseach also said there needed to be a “sensible debate” about the development of data centres and the role they will play in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). There is an effective ban on new data centres being built in the Greater Dublin Area, due to their impact on grid capacity.
“We do not have the luxury to pause [the construction of data centres] for five or six years and say we’ll catch up with the AI revolution later on. That cannot happen and will not happen.”
Having effectively won the general election in November, Martin seems determined to move decisively on key social issues to try to break the logjam. The trick now is to put those strong words into action.
