Mr. Eddie Taaffe:

I have a couple of points. First, what we need to do is give the construction certainty. At a high level, that is there in Housing for All, where the social and affordable housing targets for each local authority have been published. Beneath that level, each local authority is preparing a housing delivery action plan, which details how, where and when they are going to meet those projects. They will state what year the houses will come on stream, the settlements and locations. They are being worked on at the moment and the intention is to publish them in June. That will bring a greater level of analysis and transparency to exactly where and when houses will be delivered. That will be useful for the construction sector.

This probably applies more to the larger urban areas such as Dublin, Cork, Galway and so on but there are benefits to master plans. We need to utilise master plans for areas for redevelopment. We should get everybody who has a stake in delivery in that area around the table, led by the local authority, the landowners and the various State agencies, to decide what they want to deliver in the area, how it will work and how they will operationalise it. That was the way the SDZs worked. There have been positive and negative comments about SDZs but I think the model works. The timing was unfortunate in that they came with the 2008 crash and that inhibited development on a lot of them. The development plan states what we want to build, the type of development and where it will go. The next step in the process is the planning application. That comes in and it is a "Yes" or a "No", or it goes to the board and that says "Yes" or "No". There has to be a piece in the middle, called active land management, where everybody gets around the table. They will have zoned the land and they can discuss what they want to develop, how they will operationalise it, who is going to provide what infrastructure and what the costs are. That way, we can develop those master plans with a collaborative approach. There is a model there and we need to use that more, particularly on our large development sites. They are called urban development zones, UDZs, in the Housing for All plan. That is an area where we could bring people around the table with a collaborative approach.