It's people who will solve our housing crisis

‘If you build it, they will come’, is the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams. But in the Ireland of today, to turn fields into dreamed-of houses, we need to reverse the line: if they come, you will build it.

For we don’t have enough construction workers in Ireland. Without thousands more of them to do the work, all the talk of building houses is just that: talk. And much of that talk isn’t helping.

We spend too much time, for example, complaining about people who want to invest in property. You might not like what investors do and how they make money, but in the housing crisis we have in Ireland, they are not the real problem.

And even with the dizzying increases in construction costs and interest rates, we’re not short of cash to invest. People in employment at all levels in our economy – including many who are young – have lots of income that they want to invest in a home. There are hundreds if not thousands of those from the west of Ireland in Dublin, only too keen to use their relatively good incomes to buy a house or apartment – and get out of the overpriced rental market. We all hear those stories home and away. The only sure way to stabilise and even bring down the price of what they might buy is to build more.

Among the older generations, there are mountains of cash built up in banks and other financial institutions and a lot of it is held by people who do not consider themselves wealthy. More of that money can be used for building with bricks and mortar. For those who cannot afford to buy or pay the full price of their own home, the government has loads of cash to build social housing – or subsidise private housing purchases through all sorts of schemes.

We are certainly not short of demand. We might not have our planning system and types of buildings exactly right, but even with that, we could really start moving if we had the necessary people. Their absence is the real issue.

So, how are we going to find these people? We are of course already importing a lot of the labour we need, even if it is nowhere near enough. Bringing them in on a permanent basis though comes with one hitch. If someone moves here to build houses, they need a house for themselves before they start. That’s only fair.

Now we could of course pay construction workers more to tempt people in other sectors from what they are doing now into construction but there are two problems with that. First, even a great chef may not be ready on day one to plaster a wall. Second, we need the chef to keep cooking, for as anyone working in hospitality will tell you, there is no danger of the broth getting spoiled in our hotels and restaurants.

We can of course train more apprentices and we are. But time is not our ally here. We need to move much faster than that.

Some say we need to bring former construction workers back into the area. We lost a lot of those after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger – we are around 80,000 workers below the level we had then. But that debate misses the point and the reality of what it is to work on a building site. We need to remember that the crash happened 15 years ago. Most construction workers and tradespeople know that you get about 15 to 20 good years to make your money in that kind of work. After that, you can tip along but your heavy lifting is done: the body can only take so much of the demands, of the cold mornings, of the rough and tumble that is part and parcel of that work.

Most of the fellas who left construction after the Celtic Tiger collapse are now in their late forties and fifties, or even older. If they are not still working in construction today, you are codding yourself if you think you can tempt them back tomorrow. They might come back to do the odd nixer (and good luck to them) but that won’t put a dent in what we need, which is highly skilled, pretty young, hard-working, and strong people – motivated by good money – to put a serious shift every day into a big construction site. That’s the type of person we need. And we don’t have anywhere near enough of them.

And we need them across the board. We need engineers and painters and plasterers and bricklayers and more. We need them all.

As I’ve said, construction workers are coming to Ireland, but they are coming in dribs and drabs, not in the kind of structured way we need. So, what options do we have? Maybe we could use a method widely used across Europe for big infrastructure projects.

In that method, packages of work on big construction projects – be it the groundwork, the electricianship, the welding – are tendered out and firms from around the EU can bid for them. Whoever wins can bring their team – their workforce – into the country, do the job and then leave. The system to organise that transfer of workers is called the Posted Workers Directive. It is a legal framework that provides safeguards to make sure that the workers are being paid the proper local rate of pay and local terms and conditions, while also ensuring that they retain all the contract benefits they might have from their home country if those benefits are superior. If you are posted for less than six months in your temporary location, you don’t pay tax there.

Now, if we were to find a method to make greater use of this system in large housing developments, we just might be able to attract the workers we need. So, in that method, where hundreds if not thousands of houses are being built on a series of construction sites, the plumbers would arrive from say, a Spanish company, the electricians from somewhere else. They would do the work in their specialty and then move on.

Some might worry that this would drive down the rate and that the Posted Workers Directive would be fine in theory but would not work in practice. Here it would be the role of the state to ensure we have enough labour inspectors to ensure that the workers are treated well and that their labour is not used to disadvantage local labour. Organising all that would be a big challenge for sure but we are facing a big challenge. And it’s not a new method, we just need to use it more widely and where it is most needed.

The workers might be accommodated in large modular type accommodation, which can be used again for the next set of workers that follow them. The attraction for the worker is that you come here, you work hard, nobody exploits you, and then you go home to wherever you are from with your bag full of money, that you have well earned.

There are probably lots of complications and challenges to make it work on the scale we need. But on the Sherlock Holmes principle that if you eliminate all the things that are impossible, what is left must be the explanation, or in this case, at least part of the solution.