Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have also marked that as an issue. I support the thrust of the Bill; it is a great piece of work but on section 6, I do not see the merit in informing the Minister because he or she does not acquire properties. It could be strengthened by saying that where the site is admitted to the register, the local authority "shall" commence steps so the local authority is compelled to commence steps to acquire the property. If the Minister wants to know what is going on in a local authority, he gets reports from the local authorities. Reporting to the Minister on how many sites there are or that a site has been on the derelict sites register for two years will not trigger any action from him or her, however good he or she is. In my experience, local authorities act independently in that space. I like the amendments, which are good; having more information would be good. The Dublin City Council list is a link to an Excel spreadsheet with the addresses. I do not think it even puts the date on which the properties were added to the derelict sites register. In parallel, it operates a vacant sites register and it has a third list, a dangerous buildings list, all of which I am sure creates gainful employment for some administrator some place but are doing sweet FA to tackle dereliction and vacancy in Dublin city. When I inquired about significant sites in the city that are clearly derelict and underutilised, Dublin City Council came back with a response that the property was on the derelict sites register but had to be taken off because the owner put in a planning application, which was being pursued, or that planning permission was granted and the owner intended to commence work but that was now subject to a judicial review. There is an issue around making local authorities do something. If this Bill was strengthened to say the local authority "shall" commence the process of acquiring compulsorily the property, it would go a long way to focusing minds and generating action.

I have a small grammatical question on Part 2. I do not know if this is intentional but it states in the definition in Part 2 that it is "... any site in an urban area". Is that deliberately restricted to urban areas?