Mr. Niall Cussen:

I thank the Senator. If one is looking for a single national dataset around land, planning permission, infrastructural capability and actual progress on the ground, it does not currently exist. It is an objective of the Department of housing to progress that project. It has been in progress for quite some time. It would be of great benefit to infrastructure agencies if they all had, if you like, a shared heat map to show where the pressures are and, therefore, where investment needs to be focused. What I said in my opening remarks was that we see every development plan in the country. Ms O'Connor and her team go through the development plans in close detail. We have the plans evaluation forum, which is a non-statutory piece that pulls together Uisce Éireann, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, the National Transport Authority, the Office of Public Works, the Department of education, our own parent Department and a number of other agencies around physical and social infrastructure. When we look at those development plans, we try to understand how they fit with the national planning framework and the national development plan. We do that in the knowledge of where the different national agencies are. We try to reflect that and pull it together from a considered and whole-of-government perspective to support the local authorities. That is the type of detailed information we have at a development plan by development plan level. There are 31 city and county development plans and 150 or 200 local area plans, and that is the depth of knowledge in our office.

We understand that the Department of housing and the accelerating infrastructure team are working on that., as is the housing activation office. All I said in my opening remarks was that this is the depth of perspective that we bring to the process. That is a key objective on which we must work collectively in the coming months.