Lack of housing 'a drag' on investment in Ireland, admits Varadkar

 Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, and Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O'Brien.

The lack of housing is a drag on investment in Ireland but the pipeline of investment from foreign investors is strong, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has admitted.

“The infrastructure is not up to scratch when it compares to other European countries,” he said.

“So it's very clear they were rich for a lot longer than we were at that time to do so. There are some cities that started their Metro over 100 years ago, and we're only starting now so we will have a lot to do to catch up,” he added.

Speaking at the launch of the Government’s White Paper on Enterprise, Mr Varadkar said that while the infrastructure shortcomings are not unique to Ireland, they are impacting the ability of the country to attract investment.

“Is the housing shortage a drag on investment, yes it is. That is not a new thing. When I am meeting senior executives and senior board members of companies that are thinking about investing in Ireland, they do ask about our infrastructure,” Mr Varadkar said.

'Infrastructure is definitely a barrier'

He said: “Those companies want to know if there is enough housing for the workers that they might want to come in?, is there going to be enough electricity? Is there going to be enough water and wastewater”.

“So infrastructure is definitely a barrier to further growth in Ireland,” he said.

These aren't necessarily problems unique to Ireland, these companies find these issues in California as well or in other places, he said.

“But it is a drag on investment. That is true, but not to the extent that it's caused investments go down because it hasn’t,” he added.

Mr Varadkar said the tech sector is in retrenchment but there will be what he called “solid investment” in that area.

Defending his party’s record in office, the Tánaiste said we shouldn't forget that there was a major economic financial crash 12 years ago, and there was a period of up to six years where we just couldn't afford to build anything.

“And we have to catch up on that. We've had a rapid increase in population and a rapidly growing economy. So we're kind of running up an escalator that's coming down at us just to keep up with infrastructure,” he said.

Investment target

Mr Varadkar was speaking after the Cabinet approved a new enterprise policy which will set a target of having at least half of all foreign direct investments up to 2024 going to locations outside Dublin.

The White Paper on Enterprise will also seek to have over two thirds of new jobs created by Enterprise Ireland generated outside of Dublin.

The policy also outlines an ambition to achieve a 50% increase in the number of large Irish exporting companies by 2030.

It will also lay out a target for 2,000 additional Irish-owned firm to have become exporters by 2030.

The document also seeks to achieve 2.5% average annual growth in productivity in Irish-owned businesses by 2024.

To achieve this vision, Government will focus on seven priority enterprise policy objectives including integrating decarbonisation and net zero commitments. Our targets: 35% emissions reduction from Industry by 2030; and 45% emissions reduction from Commercial Built Environment by 2030.