Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Ó Broin has probably said it all. I believe this is an obligation on the local authority to put together a housing development strategy. One part of the strategy is about compact urban development sites. We have a lot of towns and a number of cities. In itself, building in compact urban sites is sustainable - brownfield sites - and it is about making that work. If the Minister of State could define some wording to go into the Bill in the context of embodied carbon then it is up to the local authority, the planning department, the director of the department and his or her staff to work out what is the strategy and what is the statement of measures that this development plan will have relative to compact urban sites in the context of embodied carbon. It is coming anyway. As the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, said, this is a 25-year plan. What we are talking about is coming in hopefully within the next five years or less. It should have been put in last year. The State architect sat here last year and said we could have embodied carbon measurement at the beginning of last year 2023. Pat Barry from the Irish Green Building Council said the same. It is not hard to do it. I have done it myself. There is software to just measure the embodied carbon. I do not see why the Minister of State cannot find some sort of wording that can reference this going forward.