A very large part of the increase in employment in the construction sector after 2004 came from the Eastern European countries which joined the EU then but were only allowed to enter Sweden, the UK and Ireland. From 1 May 2004 and 30 April 2005 some 85,114 workers arrived here from the 10 States that joined. Their tradesmen were, for the most part, better trained and had a better work ethic than Irish tradesmen. I say that as an Irish Tradesman. We'll never see anything like that again.The guy I spoke to the other day is a carpenter. That work isn't especially dangerous.
Most of the guys who built our house in the late 90s were either in America, unemployed or in dead end jobs throughout the 80s.
Fair point but if there are other bottlenecks are the same size then there is a significant risk of inflation in those sectors. In other words developers have more money to chase labour, materials etc so prices go up without a significant increase in supply.The ridiculous tax wedge on housing development and construction is one of those bottlenecks. The risks of easing that as an experiment for a year or two are low to non-existent. What are we afraid of?
That seems to be an argument that we should never ever build more housing.Fair point but if there are other bottlenecks are the same size then there is a significant risk of inflation in those sectors. In other words developers have more money to chase labour, materials etc so prices go up without a significant increase in supply.
I don't see it that way.That seems to be an argument that we should never ever build more housing.
No reason why a number of initiatives can't be undertaken in parallel. Invariably some will work, others won't.I don't see it that way.
I think we should be putting most emphasis fixing the supply side constraints. That means reforming and massively simplifying the planning system and doing all we can to speed up the move towards factor built houses and efficiencies within the construction sector. The latter will involve an overhaul of the Department of the Environment and the Dickensian regulations around housing standards.
True, but the Permanent Government who are a big part of the problem are masters at spending other people's money rather than fixing their own affairs. They will hide their waste, inefficiency, incompetence and ineptitude behind any other initiatives.No reason why a number of initiatives can't be undertaken in parallel. Invariably some will work, others won't.
Labour; we don't have the people to build the houses.
Have you ever tried to get a work visa for a non EU citizen? I have. It can take months.We operate in single market for labor of 500m people and where we are quite a wealthy country inside that block.
Developers, armed with opportunities to make money, would globally source talent......ya know....kind of like the way Canada / Australia didnt have the people to build their stuff?! But did in the end with OUR plumbers/sparkies and at our expense........money talks and you can fill in the rest......super normal profits in development would expand labor....where there's margin, there's a way.......you just have to pay up.....this is simple.....ever meet a construction guy heading to a muslim country in Middle East to work in 40 degree heat or heading to the mining town wat North of Perth....he isn't going there for fun.....you pay up, the labor SHOWS up...thats the evidence...you expand the profit pool for building homes by removing VAT.....'greedy'developers will kill themselves to hire labor from overseas at higher rates such that they can capture some of those profits
Have you ever tried to get a work visa for a non EU citizen? I have. It can take months.
I don’t think there’s enough available labour in the EU as there’s a huge shortage of that skilled labour all across the mainland.
That applies to any sector. I'd rather see the State reduce it's take from the wages of those skilled employees we need rather than the consumer paying more.If you pay enough, there will be enough labour.
Yes, but the Darwin miners are in Darwin, in the middle of nowhere. They work in the mines which are in Darwin, which is in the middle of nowhere. We need people working all over the country, in dispersed sites mainly in highly populated areas. Getting them to and from their temp bunk bed pre-fabs would, to say the least, be a challenge.Now where to you put them without causing an incremental housing crisis......well this goes back to the Darwin Australia mines proposition.....they'd need to be housed in temp bunk bed type setups in pre-fab solutions.....not ideal for them....and thats why you have to pay a kings ransom
Yes, but the Darwin miners are in Darwin, in the middle of nowhere. They work in the mines which are in Darwin, which is in the middle of nowhere. We need people working all over the country, in dispersed sites mainly in highly populated areas. Getting them to and from their temp bunk bed pre-fabs would, to say the least, be a challenge.
Firstly it's not a crisis, that's what they have in war dozen and when there's famines etc. We have a problem, a big one, but not a crisis. That sort of hyperbole plays well with the hand wringers in RTE, the Housing Charity Industry and the sheep who think that the Shinners will solve everything but it takes a special kind of myopathy to look at what's going on around the world and think we have any crisis' to deal with in this country.I think that is self-evident or else we wouldn’t have a housing crisis…...we need the attractiveness to both labor and capital to increase to solve our housing problem…….changing the underlying margin dynamics in the industry would change that….another way is as you say….on the income tax side…..incremental trades people who haven’t been in the Irish tax system for the last 24 months…should be given a two year income tax break….this would catch the eye of Irish immigrants tempted abroad to come back home and new European labor looking for the highest after tax return to their skillsets.
It's really important to remember that the housing price issues (there's no crisis) across most of the developed world is driven by a massive increase in money supply (QE), not an increase in demand.
Yes, we had that influx of cheap skilled labour from the 10 new EU member States and a very different economy. We had has low levels of house price inflation for decades due to the high interest rates of the 70's and 80's so there was a lot of slack in the market.There are 2 separate and distinct problems:
In the 2000s we had a house price spiral without ever suffering chronic shortages. The house price spiral made building and renovation profitable.
- a chronic shortage of housing
- a housing price spiral.
In the 2010s and 2020s building and renovation became much more difficult than previously, with baneful consequences.
Immigration has actually accelerated since then. It woudn't matter if we now had a million available builders. Housing provision is now a deeply unattractive prospect for anyone tempted to examine it as a serious possibility. Policy-wise, we have lost the plot.Yes, we had that influx of cheap skilled labour from the 10 new EU member States
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