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

I take this opportunity to indicate that I will leave myself the option of submitting a further amendment for Report Stage. In the context of planning statements, I mentioned that the requirement to assess housing needs as part of the regional spatial and economic strategy should be more specific and should include an assessment of specifically social and affordable housing needs and not just of the general housing need. This is for fairly obvious reasons. We can prescribe that we need a certain number of houses in general, but we have often seen how we can get the housing but it not necessarily affordable or how a sufficient percentage of it is not social housing. We still end up with long waiting lists or people being priced out of the market. That needs to be looked at in the context of these strategies. The likely need for social, affordable and cost-rental housing needs to be assessed as part of our strategy.

It might be said that the issue of sports facilities is covered by the reference to recreational facilities in section 27(13)(a), but we should probably also mention sports facilities specifically. We all know that the lack of pitches and other sports facilities is becoming a serious issue.