No quitten we're whelan onto chitchat 12.

has anyone any information if there was any rebate or help for small construction company’s or farmers using green diesel or white for the van/jeep etc. I’m only a small operation but between the digger and vans on the road it’s €700 a week on diesel and it’s crippling me on jobs that I’ve priced weeks/months ago.

No Brian, you won't, because I had an identical experience with my Mam. When we really needed it, the care was fantastic.

II seen it in a previous job, not washed, not fed and treated like a cash cow to draw down money from the services, outside of that treated like a sack of spuds.

I wasn’t talking about the wasters to be honest. I’m taking about people that have good jobs and still can’t get a house, living at home with parents, hidden homeless if you like. I have friends that have very good steady jobs and simply can’t get a house, they’d come from good hard working families too, any house that comes up is snapped up immediately, if one stays on the market there’s usually a problem with it. It’s gone out of control. I’m doing my a sketch right now for foundations I have to mark out, house is just over 2300 sq Ft, the lad wer doing it for is nearly 40, it will cost over €500k just to get in to the house with just a few rooms finished. I can safely say they’ll be paying back for it until they’re in their 70’s. Things could be done overnight to help these people if they wanted, VAT, planning “contribution”, ESB, IW, to name but a few. Maybe they should all head off to Whitegate 😂
As for healthcare, I have close family working in the HSE, I’m not even going to go there, all I’ll say is people don’t know half of what goes on.

ah I know but I suppose the market dictates that so not much can be done about those costs. A lot of builders were at the protests last week on their own time too, It’s not all rosy in that game either and before our resident expert jumps in, no they weren’t just sending their apprentices in the vans for the crack. I know builders that are taking on no more new houses, an absolute pain to price them / stick to the price and a bigger pain to get anyone to do the work afterwards.

2300 sq.ft is a very large house, maybe not by modern standards but it is. People now expect to live in very large houses compared to 20-30 years ago. And then complain at the cost of building them. A friend of my sister is currently building a McMansion with her fiancée, there were tears over the cost of it and she wouldn't take no for an answer when asked to downsize the plans. They're half way though now, and stressed already. Money borrowed from both sets of parents in addition to the mortgage. They'll spend they lives paying for it and it will be a millstone around their necks. But that's what they wanted, to have the big house and to have everyone jealous of that fact.

This is what annoys me with people comparing things to the 80s and 90s. Families lived in houses not much more than half this size that were very simply furnished. Say I with a 1400 sq.ft house and the green eyed monster 😀

It's simple, people don't want to cut their cloth to suit their measure in modern day Ireland.

I’m sure he doesn’t, we all know of houses years ago that had 10 or 12 children with 2 or 3 bedrooms but ya the price of stuff is gone out of control and the government is making a killing, like the oil, the more expensive labour and materials are the more the government make out of it

Covid, wars, inflation, people taking the piss, labour shortage, list goes on.

Look I might be wrong, my point is if the government were making money from VAT when concrete was €100/m why not for example set VAT rates for materials from their price a few years ago, it would just give people some little break. VAT is a killer.

you’re preaching to the converted here, my house is smaller and a simple layout than the one I’m talking about even though I did most of it myself I still kept it very simple. I’m just using it as an example. The notion of just building smaller houses only works for the one off houses, what about the majority who are moving into crap built 1200 sq Ft estate houses for over €400k and wouldn’t have enough space to keep a cat.