John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending and for their public service. For the record, while it has nothing to do with climate change, I would be appalled if we were to restrict ourselves to three or four public housing designs. In south County Dublin, there was an architect, Thomas Joseph Byrne, who designed several Carnegie libraries and local authority houses using innovative architectural techniques. He won many architectural awards for his designs. Architecture needs to take context into account. There is something Stalinist in having three or four housing designs, particularly in view of the scale of social housing we are going to build.

As a former local authority member of long standing, I am of the view that cycle parking facilities have been overlooked for many years. We tend to locate cycle parking outside residential buildings as opposed to within and, certainly, outside commercial and office buildings. I do not see why they should not be incorporated within. It would encourage much more use. In Dublin city, for example, there is only one car park where one can park a bike for free, namely, that on Drury Street. As we are encouraging more people to use bicycles, the Department needs to put its stamp on this and mandate local authorities, particularly in urban areas, to start providing this. I was in Utrecht with a colleague recently. The biggest bicycle park in the world right is located right in the heart of that city.

The witnesses spoke about reusing existing building stock and encouraging the use and re-use of buildings in urban and rural areas while influencing transformational change in the pattern of development and settlement by securing more compact growth. Everything is local. I know Mr. Paul Hogan from sitting opposite him in the South Dublin County Council chamber. He was highly esteemed by both his colleagues and elected representatives. When we were going through the last development plan, I noted they are quite mature areas in my constituency where one has incredibly long back gardens. In the city, they tended to be used for the development of mews buildings in the past. Under the development plans, it is allowed for their development but the public is not aware of this. In my constituency, there are gardens between 120 ft and 200 ft long. I presume that ties into the compact growth the witnesses were talking about because it uses existing land, facilities, utilities, roads, transport and schools.

I would not like to see the idea of the much maligned granny flat binned because in all probability - I am just throwing out this figure - one in five houses in my constituency is an empty nest. The reason often is that there is no alternative to trade down in the area. I would favour an incentivised scheme where somebody could look at the opportunity-----