Professor John FitzGerald:

The national planning framework is focused on dense development. It is a matter for the local authorities to deliver development that will work for people by facilitating active modes of transport and making mass public transport more efficient and economically viable. That is one area. Another area that is really important concerns the housing stock. This is an area in which Northern Ireland probably does things better. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive manages the housing stock for the whole of the North, whereas, in this State, each local authority is responsible for its own area. The State is the largest landlord in this country and it is landlords, not tenants, who have responsibility for upgrading and retrofitting their dwellings. As such, local authorities have the responsibility to upgrade the 100,000 dwellings, or whatever number it is, in State ownership. That is going to cost billions. It is a huge task and it may be that we need a housing executive, similar to the body in the North, to undertake it. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive has done a lot of stuff from which we could learn. The Climate Change Advisory Council has already learned from some of that interesting work and we included that learning in the recommendations that were taken on board in the climate action plan.

Local authorities can provide leadership in this area. To give an example, Kilkenny County Council, before upgrading a local authority estate, worked with the county engineer to source a builder, vet everything and ensure the thing was done right. The private owners of the houses on the estate then asked about upgrading their own homes, having seen that the authority had worked out how to do it, got a good price from the builder and checked that everything was done properly. Our recommendation, which was included in the budget, was to use the State's resources to prioritise the upgrading and retrofitting of local authority dwellings. The local authorities are playing an important role in this area. I was at a conference where representatives from Dublin City Council talked about finding different ways of financing the upgrading, which was innovative and interesting. Local authorities need assistance and they need to learn from each other. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, where things are done at scale, is a useful model. I was familiar with its work 15 years ago when I was a member of the Northern Ireland Authority for Energy Regulation. I would like to invite the Northern Ireland Housing Executive people down to talk to us in the Climate Change Advisory Council to see what we can learn from them. We tend to think about what the North can learn from the Republic. In the case of the housing executive, we might learn from the North.