Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have a lot of sympathy with the points made, particularly around ensuring the primacy of the development plan and the issues around height being a national strategy. In my locality, areas we want to see developed for height and are identified for height have not seen that investment but areas where the city would not have preferred that height because it wanted to concentrate it in a certain area have seen development. Any height strategy encourages height in some areas and discourages it in others. Previous Ministers have taken that ability to have a strategy away from us. My only concern with the proposed wordings from both Deputies is that they might also limit the Minister's powers to bring in positive measures. The Minister recently stepped in to prevent student accommodation being converted into tourist or hotel-type accommodation and also stepped in with regard to co-living. I wonder whether in trying to seek this change, we are also removing the power of the Minister to take positive steps. I appreciate that local authorities are the places for these types of decisions but there are times when local authorities get things wrong. I would not like to see us completely remove the power of the Minister if we want him to make positive decisions such as that on student accommodation, which was taken earlier this year.