Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will speak briefly to my two amendments, which are both self-explanatory. They are very simple. Amendment No. 210 is about promoting infrastructure and so on.

I wish to respond to the debate though because it is important. The proposal Deputy O’Callaghan spoke about is, in some ways, contradictory. I think back to my days in development plan discussions. With many of the issues planning applications have, there are elements of viability. If planners add additional conditions and so on, that can damage viability. There is an acceptable level of that and so on. The other side of it is I have seen many cases where, for example, the provision of street level shops has been a condition of many planning applications. Unfortunately, what happens is they lie empty for decades. We have some units in our area that were put in as a condition, which has meant those units have never been built. I dealt with an application last week that has shops on ground floor level where there is absolutely no demand. In fact, the existing shops are struggling to remain open. The challenge for what is being proposed by Deputy O’Callaghan – I do not doubt his motivation on it – is, for example, the provision of cultural spaces, which is an important aim, increases the overall cost of the project by adding it to a planning application and, therefore, the affordability that he spoke about can be damaged. In some ways, the two objectives can conflict. I am not saying he is deliberately doing that but they do conflict. We have to be careful about our positive aspirations entering into a planning application that then can either damage viability or provide spaces that are not flexible enough to be occupied. Another argument is that by providing the spaces, a bank of units is created that then becomes available for cultural use, which lowers the overall operating costs of those type of institutions because they have more availability of space to them. I would caution against this. I saw specifically in Ballymun that when we provide conditions to planning that are positive at a high level, when it actually comes down to their implementation and viability and how they impact the viability of the overall project, they can often have a different application.