Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for that great presentation. I join him in acknowledging the substantial work that the Oireachtas Library and Research Service has done on the briefing paper. It was circulated to all of us and is very comprehensive. It is important that we acknowledge the enormous amount of work that the service does. It is a wonderful resource for the committees, the Dáil and the Seanad. I have heard what Deputy Ó Broin had to say and I read the submission from the Department that was circulated earlier. We need to keep it simple. I would not have supported the reduction in respect of Part Vs from 20% to 10%. I prefer to use the broader term, "public housing", rather than social housing. It is public housing, whether it is for an affordable purpose or some other purpose. I like that concept. I hear what the Deputy is saying about SDZs. I am especially familiar with the zone in Cherrywood. There is not much State land there, it is land that is held by private developers. SDZs are different from each other depending on where they are located. We would be doing very well if we could reverse the reduction and bring the figure back up to 20%. That would be practical and reasonable. We had it before.

I looked at an application for a development in south County Dublin recently that was approved by An Bord Pleanála. We see the clustering of social or affordable housing. The sites do not necessarily have the best aspects. Many are single aspect sites, facing north, and I am concerned about that. I would like to see stronger legislation for more equal and fair distribution of units across a complex. I do not like the idea or suggestion that they are maybe slightly substandard, not the same quality of build, or that they are single aspect. If we could get 10% social and 10% affordable housing, it would be a positive move. What we do has to be incremental. The Department raises many issues about stability in the market, how this is settling in and we are seeing these units come on stream. They are standard sentences. I do not want to rubbish the Department altogether. It has legitimate concerns about stability in the market and an increased peak in outputs of the delivery of housing across all sectors by all different types of providers. In general, I support this legislation and congratulate Deputy Ó Broin and everybody involved in drafting it. If we could reverse the reduction and get the figure back up to 20% from 10%, that would be a very good day's work.