Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and his officials for coming in. It has been a meaningful engagement. To touch on one or two issues, starting with the An Bord Pleanála backlog, the Business Post broke that story last Sunday. It is a substantial backlog. There is some suggestion that up to 27,000 units are included. Clearly, this is an issue regarding the relevant development plans at the time of application and decision, but we do have an issue in this regard. A substantial number of student accommodation units are included, as well as other housing. Equally, we cannot water down or undermine the planning process or the integrity of city and county development plans. There is, however, a concern in this regard. The Minister might send us a briefing memo or note concerning what his thinking is or might be on this issue. The Central Mental Hospital site in Dundrum is one of the finest we have, after the Cherrywood special development zone, SDZ, site, and this is caught up in this backlog as well. There is clearly great potential for that site.

The Minister is a Deputy from Dublin and he will be familiar with Fingal. As he knows, we have four local authorities in Dublin. I am hearing reports concerning the homeless HAP, which is a slightly enhanced payment that he will be familiar with as well, regarding people going to Fingal and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and being told that they need to go to the homeless initiative in Dublin city. They are not getting a warm, empathetic and supportive response and we must examine this. The Minister will not have the detail but I ask him to look into this matter. I am happy, though, to provide more detail. Each of the four local authorities in the Dublin area should be able to respond in this regard locally and connect. A couple came to me in tears last week because they had been told they had to go into the city. It is not a nice situation for people to be in and I think we should have a conversation with officials in the four Dublin local authorities to see if we can deal with this matter locally.

Moving to the rural housing guidelines, I could paint the walls with the number of letters concerning rural housing guidelines from successive Ministers with responsibility for housing. The Minister will be very familiar with the issues in play in this regard. It is time to address this issue. Tomorrow, we will have young farmers outside our gate protesting about several issues. One of them is the rural housing guidelines and the sons and daughters of farmers not being able to build houses. By golly, they would love to build them this year, within the next 12 months, because under the Minister's new arrangements, there will be no levies charged for their one-off houses. These people cannot, though, get planning permission for these one-off houses. It is now timely, therefore, if it was ever important, to address this aspect. I would like to think this will be done in the next week or two. I was told months ago that this was going to be done next week. We need the housing guidelines for rural communities. It is imperative, particularly in light of this window of opportunity the Minister has presented for one-off houses today. I thank him.