Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late; I was in the Chamber. I thank all the witnesses for their submissions on this important discussion. There is a remarkable degree of consensus on the high-level policy objectives that are required. One of the frustrating aspects for the witnesses' organisations, as much as for us committee members, is that if we cast our minds back to when the consultation for the national planning framework was under way, many of them were saying the exact same things at that point. Here we are a number of years later and, notwithstanding some of the good parts of the NPF, it is in the implementation that we are finding difficulties at present.

Any review of the NPF, not least from the point of view of housing and residential development, has three main challenges. The first, which I do not think any of the witnesses mentioned, although it is relevant to the debate, especially in the context of meeting our emissions reduction targets in the built environment, is that the population growth target, and, therefore, the new residential development target underpinning the NPF, is wrong.

Most of us knew it was wrong at the time. It did not take into account pent-up or existing demand within our housing system and was based on poor readings, even then, of existing census data and, of course, factors that nobody could have anticipated, for example, the war in Ukraine. When the Housing Commission finally reports later this year, if The Irish Timesleaks are to be believed, we are looking at a new residential development need of approximately 50,000 units a year. In the context of meeting our emissions reductions targets, that has to be named. If we thought it was a challenge when people were talking about 30,000 new homes a year, at 50,000 it is an even bigger challenge.

I absolutely support the points that have been made. We are building houses in the wrong place. I live in Clondalkin and I represent Clondalkin and Lucan. Far more homes are being built outside the M50 west and in counties Kildare and Meath than in our urban core in Dublin. If one visits Cork or Waterford city, virtually nothing new is getting built, and likewise, in the towns and villages. Notwithstanding the fact that the NPF prioritises compact growth, that is not what has happened in the intervening period. I am sure all the witnesses have seen the Chartered Institute of Building's mapping exercise where it looks where those homes are being built. That is a real problem. Something the committee has spent a lot of time on but that many us are frustrated with the lack of action in the Department on is that those new homes are being built with the wrong materials. Either perfectly good structures are being demolished and new homes rebuilt or we are still stuck with traditional build or so-called "modern methods of construction", MMC. There is nothing modern about them. They have been around for 100 years.

If we are to build or provide those additional homes but we use the same settlement patterns as we have until now, using the same building methodologies and the same planning, we are not even not going to meet our 2030 targets. We will be on the wrong side of that in terms of very significant increases in embodied carbon in the built environment even if we get good progress on renewable energy and household energy consumption. The question I would like to ask each of the organisations is if there is consensus on the high-level objectives, the real issue is, if the revised NPF and the revised housing needs demand assessment moves us up that gear towards those 50,000 homes a year to meet existing and future housing demand, what needs to change in implementation? If the Minister, the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste were here and they could name a number of priority actions around the implementation of those broad principles that they outlined they would like to see in the review, what would be top of their list? These discussions in the committee are only of use if we can go back to the Minister and make some proposals. I am interested to hear from their different perspectives what needs to change to ensure, if all of the things they outlined are worked into the revised NPF, this time around they actually happen or at least some of them do.