Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is good to see the officials again. I have worked with them in different guises. I would not worry about using the wrong titles. There are often occasions when local authority officials are in here and we revert back to calling them managers. We can always get it wrong and it says more about my age than anything the chief executive said.

I want to discuss two points of complexity and it is important at this stage to try to get the officials' views on this, one of which is the areas where there might be joint ownership between a private landlord and a local authority. One site that comes to mind is the Ballymun shopping centre, which was a good site and was a 50-50 arrangement. I am not sure if there are many such sites, but have the officials thought through the implications there? Obviously, we would not want a scenario where a local authority was contributing or paying in that way.

The second point is where there is complex multi-ownership of sites. I believe Dublin City Council has had discussions with regard to some of the older industrial estate sites where multi-ownership has proven one of the key issues as to why development has not happened on those sites, because lots of people just want to continue doing what they are doing there. Have the officials given any thought to areas where there is complex multi-ownership and how the total zoning of a site would impact in those cases?

It is the nature of the city that in all of the ten years I was a member of Dublin City Council, I dealt with only one rezoning outside of the city development plan process. It shows how much the city is already zoned or where it is not done through a local area plan, LAP. The concern would be that there would be requests to dezone and this would put additional pressure on planning departments that are already quite stretched, with the resource implications of that. It would be interesting to see, within the cities that have established zoning networks or known zoning status, if the officials anticipate an increase in demand for requests for dezoning.