Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Barrett for the compliments he paid to the officials in the Department of Finance and, indeed, everyone who has been involved in the recovery. Colleagues know the Government has prioritised recovering the house building market in order that there is a supply of houses and apartments right through the country but also in the Dublin area, which again might be sufficient. We have come through a period - starting nearly ten years ago in 2008 - in which activity was reduced initially and then stopped. There was a period in the middle of the recession where no house was built except the occasional once-off house in rural Ireland. There is a supply shortage.

Due to some abuses in the industry in the past, the dearth of activity was paralleled by a strengthening of the regulatory regime for house building and apartment building. When I meet representatives of builders and planners I ask them why have no apartments been built between the canals in Dublin but I have been told that the price of land is too high. The price of land in building is really the unit cost of the land. Were the local authority to allow another five or six storeys, the unit cost would go down. If the same patch of land sustained another five storeys with four apartments then there would be another 20 apartments and the price of land would not be too dear. There is a combination of factors.

I am not in favour of bad planning or anything like that but every city in the world allows people to live in apartments in its central area, especially young single people. While it does not have to be Manhattan, neither does it have to be as low rise and confining as it is in Dublin at present. That is only one aspect of the recovery. There is a very big Rebuilding Ireland programme that the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government is driving forward and I do not need to enumerate all the initiatives that are being taken. Progress is being made both on social housing and private housing. Ultimately, only supply will moderate prices.

The Deputy's contribution on fast, easily accessible public transport is very important. That is the key to a lot of it. Not everyone is going to live in Dún Laoghaire or on the coast. If people are to live in the counties around Dublin, and the city is the major workplace, it is essential that there is fast, affordable public transport to allow people to commute. It has to be done in a way that it will not take them all morning and all evening, because people need to get home to their families.

The national planning framework is being worked on under the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government. To give some context for that, the census figures have been emerging in recent weeks and they were published in a county-by-county basis today. The population of the Republic is 4.76 million but the projection is that by 2040, which is not that far away, there will be another million people on our part of the island. People can imagine what another one million people would do to magnify the problems which Deputy Barrett just illustrated. The national planning framework is an essential piece of work as an attempt to take some pressure off the Dublin area and for other centres to be made more growth-friendly and more living-friendly so that there will be better population distribution. There is no doubt that for our younger colleagues in the Parliament, these are the issues with which they will wrestle over the next 20 years. It is about how to develop an economy that has an acceptable standard of living and that regardless of what wealth is created, the good of it is not taken away by the pressure of living in the modern economy. Part of it is having work but another is how someone gets from where he or she lives to where he or she works. Will everyone be on the east coast? Looking at some of the policies of the Dublin local authorities, if it continues on the low-rise model, the city will stretch as far as Athlone when another million people come in on top of what is there already. There are huge issues. Maybe this committee could have a session on the national planning framework, if it is not outside its remit. It is extraordinarily relevant to everything that we talk about on the budgetary side and the issues that Deputy Barrett raised.