Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I would bend the stick on this one and say I do not see the point in planning permission being given for developments which 80% to 90% of the population could not possibly afford at this point. I just do not see the point in that. Is that approach to planning and development not really what, in the end, led to the Celtic tiger crash? We were building three times what we are building now. The stuff was being built but it reached a point where nobody could afford it and the whole thing just collapsed. That is the definition of unsustainable planning and development.

We have to move to a very different model which is, to use Deputy Ó Broin's words, more sophisticated. It is not just about what can be permitted, to come back to Deputy McAuliffe's point, or what is viable. Surely, the starting point is what is needed and to have a planning system which says, "This is what is needed and this is what we are going to get and what we will deliver." We will have a five- or ten-year plan setting out how many houses we need, which have to be affordable, and how much childcare provision we need, on which, by the way, none of us have put in amendments, although maybe someone has. We could probably add to this list. I can think of examples of this, including Honeypark in our area, another big development where there was supposed to be childcare but which just did not happen. We get the development but we do not get the childcare, which is a real problem, or we do not have Traveller accommodation or cultural spaces.

Deputies can speak for their own areas but in our area, local and community sports, cultural and arts organisations are crying out for space. There is a huge deficit of such space. To my mind these spaces should be positively hardwired into the planning and development process, from the highest level down to the development plan and every new level in between created in this Bill. That is why I think this is reasonable because otherwise so-called viability, which is often narrowly defined by the people who do the majority of the building, will define whether things happen or not. There are some things we cannot afford not to happen. We have to make them happen. We do not need things that are of no benefit other than to a small group of people who think they can make money from a situation.