Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Boyhan for his contribution. The Green Party has the next time slot, which I will take. I have a few questions.

I will start with the legislation as that is how things work and how we can get things done. To take up on what Deputy Ó Broin said, of course, we are very receptive to this initiative. Everybody is very receptive to allotments and community gardeners and thinks they are a good idea but getting such projects implemented is the difficulty. I know that from experience. Three items of legislation were referenced. The Labourers Cottages and Allotments (Ireland) Act 1882 was rarely if ever used I would say in the past 100 years. Therefore, we should get rid of that one. The Acquisition of Land (Allotments) Acts 1926 and 1934 were repealed. Therefore, we get rid of that one. That brings us on to the Local Government Act and the Planning and Development Act, under which local authorities may provide allotments. In my experience when we insert the word "may" into legislation, we can be up against it but if we change the word "may" to "shall", we have more momentum behind us. We might consider wording along the lines of "shall provide allotments provided there is demonstrable demand for them". Mr. McCormack spoke about facilitating provision. It is one of the organisation's recommendations. Recommendation 1C of Community Gardens Ireland's report states a clear duty should "be placed on local authorities to provide or facilitate provision of community growing spaces within 5 years". To facilitate that, are the witnesses talking about identifying land, either public or private, or zoning land and holding it? When preparing a local area plan is the land zoned first to expect the demand or is the demand catalogued and a decision made to zone some land there? How does one do it? Those are the practicalities and that is what we want to assist with.