Mr. Donald MacDonald:

I thank the Senator. We are studying Dublin. The problem with Dublin is it is so big and there are four local authorities. We have been going through it since probably October of last year. We do research but our day job is dealing with clients. It is something that we have to commit a lot of resources to. As I have been going through the Dublin planning permissions - we have been doing that on a permission-by-permission basis - to see who the stakeholder is and to assess the likelihood of the stakeholder being able to deliver the planning, I have found that it is very complex. It is really on a case-by-case basis you can see that. Hopefully, when we get to a point where we can have output, maybe that can feed into the discourse in terms of this.

It is the case that there are many complexities. The Senator mentioned how many planning permissions there are in the system. You have to look at every site. Every site is different. The stakeholders are different. Their capabilities are different. I refer, for example, to their expertise in terms of delivering apartments. If you look to see how many people have built apartments in Ireland over the ten years, it is a handful of developers and contractors. It is very complex. It is very easy to say that people are just sitting on planning but this is the point that we made. Even if you get through the planning system, it is so complex to get the money to do it. With ten houses, you build ten houses and you sell ten houses. With a block of 200 apartments, you have to build 200 apartments. If you get the balcony wrong on one of those apartments, it is all of those apartments. It is such a high risk that it is really challenging. Where we have seen it, and we are doing it, as I say, it is just a complex area.

This is the area that is hard for people to understand who are not working in it. We work in it in that we work with clients every day. We understand their frustrations, but every day we are getting feedback where they are kind of saying it does not make sense for them to do what they have been doing for the past 20, 30 or 40 years. I spoke to a gentleman from Limerick yesterday - one of the IPAV members, Mr. Paul Crosse - and he said they are in the exact same position. We are seeing in Dublin, Kilkenny and Galway that housing delivery has got so complex from a planning, building regulations and even a funding point of view. It is a complex area and that is why we are saying there needs to be a bit more engagement in terms of the LVS proposal so that people can understand it.

When the Rebuilding Ireland document was brought out eight or ten years ago, I remember that along with Mr. Brian Moran and other IPAV members, I went down to the Morrison Hotel to sit down with the Departments. We explained across the table exactly what our frustrations were. When I was at something for housing for older people in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, we did the exact same. We told them our frustrations. I remember sitting with a lady from Fingal. She said that she understood what I was saying, she saw the point and where I was coming at it from, and that I was coming at it from the construction side. I said it was just not practical to say what you just said in terms of that.