I worked in the construction sector for many years, be it in housing, pipework or whatever. Last Saturday night, I watched the news and the headline from the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis was the Tánaiste announcing that Fine Gael was committing to building 40,000 houses every year. That is great if the Tánaiste knows of a way to do this, but as someone who has worked in the sector for many years, I asked myself what cunning plan our Tánaiste has come up with.

Besides the point of having even half of it as affordable or social housing, about €10 billion would be needed with another €10 billion needed from the private sector. Can the Tánaiste tell me how we will get over the obstacle that there are 200 quarries in a planning quagmire? Can he tell me how the 14,000 or 15,000 houses that are on judicial review are going to get sorted? Unfortunately, things are being challenged day in, day out. Can the Tánaiste tell me why the forward planning of Irish Water is not funded for the next four to five years? I talk to Irish Water on a regular basis. If that funding is not put in place, there will be a problem.

The Tánaiste might not know about a thing called DoneDeal. If one looks around Dublin or in any other city, one will see that there are no lorry drivers available to take muck away from sites. One cannot get a theory test or even apply for a driving licence if one wants to go down that road. Blocklaying in a rural house in a rural area is gone from €6,000 to €16,000. The price of timber is gone up by 46%. I have spoken to the Tánaiste personally about the saga in Ireland but it is not only in Ireland. Timber is brought in as well and it is a bidding market. It is not about getting materials or the price of same but it is a question of whether the materials can be got because America and other countries are giving better prices when the boats are on the high seas.

I know the Tánaiste has spoken about apprenticeships before. We seem to put people who are accountants or whatever on a pedestal, and rightly so, but we do not seem to put the person who is the blocklayer, who is in what I call the wet trades or any apprentice on the same pedestal of people who go down a different road. Whether we like it or not, if we do not have the people who can drive the digger, lay the pipe, put down the tar, lay the blocks or do the steel structure, we will not have someone doing it with a computer. I am asking the Tánaiste if he can shed light on this for me because it is like Christy Moore's song; I thought about it for a while and "The dream turned into a nightmare" for me when I started asking myself how we will get around all of these obstacles.

The other part of this is that we had the climate action Bill last week. The Greens, who are delusional in my world, believe we will reduce emissions when we need to build 40,000 houses per year. I do not disagree with the Tánaiste on that, but I ask him to tell me how we can square the circle.

I know there are few people in this House, including me, who spend much time reading the manifestos of political parties but the commitment to increase housing supply to 35,000 to 40,000 new homes was contained in the Fine Gael manifesto for the last general election. I restated that ambition at the weekend and I stand over the fact that I did so. Back in 2016, we were only building 5,000 to 6,000 homes per year. We are now up to around 20,000 homes per year, notwithstanding the fact that construction was blighted by the pandemic. We used to build 80,000 homes per year and I believe that setting the ambition of getting to 40,000 per year is ambitious but realistic. It is double where we are now and half where we were during the housing boom some time ago. I am not saying we can do it next year - do not get me wrong on that. That is certainly not what I said, but I think we can scale up to that target. We think there will be about 20,000 public and private builds this year and perhaps we can go to 25,000, 30,000, 35,000 and 40,000 or perhaps we can go a bit faster to 27,000, 34,000 and 41,000. That is the kind of thing we are talking about in the Government as we put together the Housing for All policy, which is the Government's new housing policy, replacing Rebuilding Ireland.

I see Davy Group suggested in its report today that this is not enough. It said that we need to build 200,000 new homes in three years. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is possible to scale up to 60,000 or 70,000 homes per year in such a timeframe. I take the Deputy's point that if it was easy to do, it would have been done by now. It is not easy. We have issues around access to capital, both for the Government and private builders. We also have issues around a shortage of skilled labour and the availability of serviced land by Irish Water and by local authorities. We also have issues around the planning process, which takes a long time in this State and often ends up stuck in judicial reviews. We also have issues around the availability of materials. Steel is becoming more expensive and less available because of this central bank-fuelled boom around the world. Central banks have printed €9 trillion and that has driven up the cost of commodities, with a boom happening in China for example.

While they might not say it publicly, everyone in this House privately understands that there is nobody in this House who would not like to see more houses built as quickly as possible but there are lots of constraints that are not always under our control. We will do our best to deal with them as best we can, however. That involves increasing Government investment in public housing, of which social housing will be the major part. It also involves the Government investing in apprenticeships and the Deputy will know what the Minister, Deputy Harris, is doing in that regard. That is having some real success in getting more people into apprenticeships in line with the target of 10,000 apprenticeships per year. It will mean the Government trying to make sure that more sites are serviced through programmes such as the local infrastructure housing activation fund and the capital budget of Irish Water. Beyond that, there will be things outside of our control, such as the availability of materials, one of which the Deputy mentioned.

I thank the Tánaiste for his answer. The first thing that needs to be realised is that we need to get away the cycle of boom and bang. That is why people are reluctant to go into apprenticeships. While the Minister, Deputy Harris, is bringing stuff forward, and I welcome that, there does not seem to be a lot of movement in the wet trades.

The other side of it is that there seems to be a ferocious focus on cities. If one were to look at the price of land in the smaller towns or villages, one would get better value for money. We also need to be sure about the likes of procurement. What seems to happen in this country is that one big guy applies for permission for 500 or 600 houses. Many smaller builders would not have the capital to be in that league but would be well capable of building four or five houses. Much makes more and the Government should give those small builders the opportunity to do that, as well as trying to bring older houses in rural areas back into use and giving incentives for same.

If the Tánaiste does not knuckle down over the next six months to tackle the different problems I have highlighted, having looked at the industry, they will never be solved and we will never get to our target of 40,000 houses. We must sort out the planning issues and all the other issues I have highlighted because they are causing problems and logjams in the housing industry.

I thank the Deputy and do not disagree with what he is saying. There are many different bottlenecks and points where one can run into trouble in terms of housing construction. All of those bottlenecks must be dealt with to allow for a clear and flowing pipeline of houses, which is what we want. I agree with the Deputy that every town and village in Ireland should be able to expand. I do not mean a return to sprawl or to development distant from the major cities, but any town in Ireland should be able to expand and we need to ensure that is reflected in our planning laws. Smaller builders who can build houses in fours and fives, relatively inexpensively and on relatively small sites, can make a big difference for people. That is a part of what Home Building Finance Ireland, HBFI, is supposed to be doing in lending to those small builders. It is doing that, although perhaps not to the extent it should be.

The Deputy is also right when he says that meeting the target of 40,000 houses per year as soon as possible, although we have not yet decided what year that will happen, is not just about building new houses from scratch. It must also be about bringing derelict houses back into use. Although I would not count such projects in the 40,000, we also need to ensure that vacant properties are brought back into use.