Mr. John Coleman:

As Mr. O'Rourke touched on, sustainability is non-optional. I think everyone is clear on that and it is certainly our view. We have staff dedicated to this broad area. We have an urban design and sustainability manager on our staff who is a current member and former chair of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland sustainability task force. It is something we take very seriously and something we are willing to resource up. At a strategic level we have a number of performance objectives to support sustainable delivery, including the formal adoption of the home performance index, an independently-certified sustainability assessment by the Irish Green Building Council. That is something we use to measure all our developments. We have various other policies we are adopting from a sustainability perspective and that we are embedding into the governance of the agency on an ongoing basis as well. It is a priority for us.

On actual examples and exemplars, I often think about the LDA in two ways, that is, the nearer-term delivery of construction projects and then the longer-term land assembly mandate we have. I will give two examples that can be exemplars for the LDA. The first is our largest development, which we are working on in partnership with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, at Shanganagh. It is currently on track to be the largest passive house-standard development in Europe. That is a very significant statement of intent.

On the larger scale, the Deputy may be familiar with a land assembly project we are working on in partnership with CIÉ, Limerick City and County Council and the HSE at Colbert Station, Limerick. It embraces sustainable design principles and pushes a move away from car-oriented transport modes to relying on public transport and other independent modes of transport such as cycling and walking. Again, it is adopting this 15-minute city approach where we have a good life-work proposition where long commutes are not necessary. Thus, that longer-term piece of the LDA's mandate is firmly pointed towards sustainable design principles. Not only is that just nice for me to say, but it is actual policy at the LDA and something embedded into our governance structure.