Mr. Mel Reynolds:

Local authorities do not have to do everything. The committee should consider what it is in control of. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has done amazing things over the lockdowns. I think there has been a willingness since the start of the pandemic such that stakeholders will do this sort of stuff. Previously, colleagues were telling me there were intractably closed doors. Now people are saying, "Let's do it." The public realm has changed and crossed a line, I think, with the pandemic. If the situation is made easy for people to do things, the market - people in the private sector - will do them.

One of the biggest cohorts involved in new build supply in Ireland - they never get any representation; if anything, there is unconscious bias against them - are self-builders. Between 25% and 45% of new build supply in any given year involve people who are just doing it themselves. Frequently, they get the sites themselves, battle to get planning to build in certain areas and so on. We should ask whether we can get some of those self-builders building over shops, create a situation where there is a vacant upper floor space and all the statutory permissions are in place, and those units are sold to prospective owners for them to do the work themselves or employ builders to do it. If the processes are simplified and it is made less difficult to do what we need to do, we do not have to look that far. Northern Ireland does it. We can see an awful lot more stuff happening.