Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will go next. A lot of the conversation we are having involves different views and opinions on planning, growth, how investment reflects on employment and, in turn, how that creates a population that desires to live in a place. That suggests to me that planning is not an exact science. It is our best attempt to look at the most sustainable way to grow an area. We must factor in things like what people's preferences are as well and their desires to live in a certain way in a given place but we must also factor in what a lot of developers want to build because we know there is a reason three-bedroom semi-detached houses on greenfield sites are desirable for developers to build. It is because there is a market for that and they can keep doing it out of the box every single day and build them easily. It is when we start to go back into high density and compact growth that it becomes more expensive and more open to conflict as well. There is not that much objection if you try to build 150 houses on a greenfield site on the edge of a town, but if you try to put that into a footprint within an area where people are already living, you start to get conflicts and it is made more difficult. That is the challenge we face here. From a national perspective and in terms of the high-level objectives we set out, such as climate, we must be stronger in this document and say that what people prefer and what developers want may not be for the common good.

Our land is a finite resource, as is our water supply. All of those things that make living possible in areas are finite and we cannot continue to sprawl. We are seeing Dublin sprawl. That brings me back to Deputy Ó Broin's point that if you take the entire greater Dublin area as one built-up footprint, it is Louth, Kildare, Meath and north Wicklow that are bulging rather than within the inner part of the M50. How do we wield the stick at a national level to say that is where the growth must happen, not where the developer wants it to happen? I do not know which party is the party of home ownership, but it says that home ownership is the ultimate objective here. However, we know there are different types of tenure, like the cost rental that we introduced. When we met our Green Party colleagues in Vienna to try to formulate cost rental into the Affordable Housing Bill, I asked how long someone generally stays in cost rental units before they buy somewhere. The response was to ask what I meant and why would somebody buy a property when they have a long-term secure, affordable tenancy. It is very difficult. I do not envy the witnesses the challenge of trying to put this together. Most of us have tried to do local area plans and county development plans, and I was on the regional planning assembly. It is difficult to manage the conflicting desires and objectives. I can see the challenge on a national level.

I have a question on the housing targets. Let us just say we take it as being 50,000. When we were doing assessments in this committee on the emissions contribution of building 50,000 homes by conventional methods, we saw that their construction would considerably overshoot our emissions targets. It is probably not for this document but is in the housing strategy, Housing for All, that we should set a target for the 50,000 houses and that, for example, 20% would be achieved through repurposing derelict or vacant properties using low-carbon technologies? Is it within that document that we would set it out and get into the nuts and bolts of the number of houses, the types of tenure, the types of design and that we would specify that one- and two-bedroom homes are so badly needed? Where will that detail be provided to go with this plan?