Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)

I thank both organisations for their presentations today. They identified that a number of pillars need to be sorted in regard to housing. No one pillar is actually functioning as it should. I will run through them quickly. One relates to zoned land. I was on the housing committee when we adopted the last national planning framework. Personally, I had several arguments with Niall Cussen at the time over the population figures. My key beef at the time, and it is still my problem, is allocating population growth into unserviced lands within our county development plans and dezoning lands in centres where we had infrastructure to build housing on. We have seen that throughout the country. Would it be fair to ask now for a little more flexibility within the national planning framework to allow county development plans to dictate where population growth goes and to assign growth to where we have infrastructure today and where we can build houses? The policy can wait in the alignment of infrastructure where we do not have it and we want the population growth. We have seen a number of planning permissions refused because they exceeded population caps or it was residential low to medium density, R2, zoning. I would appreciate the witnesses' comments on that.