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

I have a point for the Minister to consider as he is deliberating on this between now and Report Stage. I am not necessarily looking for a response. I understand what he is trying to do. There are risks of overdevelopment from the approach he is taking. There are potentially better ways of addressing the problem, which is that gap between the granted permission and the activation of those permissions. Two suggestions are around use it or lose it planning permission, something the Minister has spoken about before, and also about no automatic assumption that from one development plan to another, land that has not been activated, for example over two development plan cycles, would automatically get rezoned. For example, in Adamstown or other areas of south Dublin land has been zoned over a number of development plans. In Clonburris, one would not want to dezone any of it and there are very legitimate reasons it was only activated recently. However, there are other circumstances where land is deliberately not being activated where there are sites close to it which either are not currently zoned because we have a sufficient quantity of zoned land, which I accept, or where planning permissions might fall foul of the rule the Minister is trying to avoid where the owners of those lands are more likely to activate more quickly. There are some risks in this and we will come back to those when we see the Minister's wording. There are other ways of addressing the same issue of unactivated land, whether it is zoned or with permission, that would not contain those potential risks of overdevelopment. While the Minister is right that there is a lot of development in Fingal and on my side of the M50, when we look at the Chartered Institute of Building's survey of commencements inside the canals of Dublin, outside of the M50 or in the county and in the commuter belt, there is a higher level of development in my constituency and the Minister's and in counties Kildare and Meath and far too little in the urban core ,which we all want to see in terms of compact growth. I am not inviting a response from the Minister, although he can respond if he wants, but this is worthy of consideration in his deliberations with the officials.