Mr. Niall Cussen:

I agree fully with the Deputy. To some extent it goes beyond the Bill. Local authorities are now powering up their capacity in hiring vacant homes officers and taking action on vacant properties. The Minister issued a number of recent helpful initiatives in that space. The Deputy is spot on. We have something approaching an epidemic of vacancy, dereliction and underutilisation of buildings in our existing cities, towns, villages and right out into the countryside. As others, such as the Irish Green Building Council, have correctly set out well in recent years, the greenest buildings for meeting our climate targets and housing needs, are the ones we already have. We have a huge number of empty buildings or buildings that are very lightly utilised which could be sensitively adapted, repurposed and so on. There are costs and complexities in doing that. It seems clear the Government is setting out an agenda for local authorities to get much more active in that space. We have covered this in some of our media activities. In our recent overview report of the planning service, we highlighted the contrast between the numbers the Deputy quoted of what is being counted as vacant or underutilised and the numbers on the local authorities' statutory derelict sites and vacant sites registers, which are much smaller than the estimates. There is a big job to do and central government is sending a clear signal that it wants local government to be active in that space to ensure we deliver the homes we need in the right places and at the right time. It is a much bigger issue than this Bill but we support everything and anything being done for better management and use of the building stock we have.