Accelerating Infrastructure Action Plan: Motion
Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-04
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I thought the Senator was laughing at me. Maybe he was laughing at something else.
The planning element is important, but there is an issue with the number and resourcing of planners in local authorities as well as with the backlog in cases that planners are addressing. We have had complex planning legislation over in the past few years and planners say it is very difficult to keep up with the regulation. With the frameworks around planning continuing to change, it makes their jobs even more difficult. This leads to mistakes in planning decisions, which can be taken for judicial review. The more mistakes we have when planning decisions are made, the more recourse people have to take judicial reviews.
We have major issues in vital infrastructure, such as electricity and water supply. Data centres use over 20% of Ireland's electricity supply. In a few years' time, that will be 30%. That is concerning because Irish consumers are going to face massive increases in electricity prices as a consequence of that. We are going to have to choose between powering AI in the near future and powering our homes. We need to consider the planning around that.
Obviously, Uisce Éireann is linked to the water issue. When we had Uisce Éireann before the infrastructure committee a few months ago - maybe even before the summer - it put much of the responsibility for the lack of funding back on the Department. There is a lack of clarity around who is to blame - "blame" is perhaps the wrong word - and where the responsibility lies. Is it that Uisce Éireann is not doing the tasks quickly enough, is it that it is not prioritising areas, or is that the funding is not there for it to increase supply in the most critical areas?
We heard from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, last week that the construction industry needed 80,000 new workers to meet demand. The Irish construction industry is 30% less productive than our European neighbours'. I would love to hear from the Minister on what the Government is considering as regards increasing productivity in that space by utilising the construction workers we have. I heard from the Construction Industry Federation today at the infrastructure committee that nearly 70% of contractors did not do public work. That is concerning when we consider the multiple billions of euro we are about to spend on public infrastructure. Do we have the people there to make it and how can we make our market more competitive to bring in construction workers? Can we do things like joint ventures between indigenous Irish construction bodies and larger international construction bodies so that we build up our national expertise within local construction businesses and companies that may not have some of that? Some of this is expert knowledge of digging with certain machinery and equipment. Could we explore joint ventures as a way of building up our domestic expertise?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-03-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-04