Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I think the answer on the planning guidelines misses my point. I am not dismissing the use of planning guidelines but it misses the point I am making. Public consultation can be invaluable. What the public raises during a consultation can be invaluable. When it comes to any development, including housing, it is important that people get to have their say in it and get their voices heard. They can often raise issues that can be solved or addressed. In my area there was an infill development in a social housing estate. One of the big issues people brought up was that they had open green space, and getting more housing in would take up some of the open green space. They did not have high quality use of the open green space because they had no facilities like a playground for the children in the area. As the new infill housing meant there would be more children, they asked for a playground. That is what came through the process. It is not a huge playground or anything like that but in this area it makes the world of difference. It means the new households integrate better with the existing households. Was it going to be provided without the public consultation? No, it was not. Did the public consultation draw that out? It did. Was this a positive gain for the community and everyone living there? Does it make the social housing in the area more successful? Absolutely, it does. It was a win-win from the public consultation process. That was a process of people airing their views and listening to them. People worked through that in the council with public representatives to see, out of all the different views and issues people were raising, if there was something positive they could do and if it was within their means to put in a small playground. It absolutely was and that was how it arrived out. There is no evidence that public consultation process delayed the housing delivery at all. Everything I have seen around social housing delivery shows the elongated processes local authorities go through with the Department can go on for years with the four-stage approval processes. You can see it going back. I saw it when I was on the Traveller accommodation committee. You would see plans going in from the council and then six months later it would get a reply from the Department asking for an answer to certain questions, and looking for the council to get back to them on other matters. That would take several months in the local authority, and it could then be waiting between six months and nine months for the reply from the Department. This is where all of the delays were happening. It was not the short public consultation process that was taking place. The point has also been made in this committee that the public consultation process around social housing has been working well. People would struggle to think of any examples where they do not go through. From my experience and as far as I can recall in my local authority area and Dáil constituency, they have always gone through. Sometimes relevant issues are raised and they are addressed and dealt with. The Minister of State has given us figures of 30 housing developments and 995 units. There is nothing to suggest those 30 housing developments and 995 units would not have happened anyway. Will the Minister of State give us any explanation for how these would not have happened without these provisions?