Mr. Niall Cussen:

In the Deputy's own time, I ask that he go through the briefing pack we gave and look at the maps. Look at the photographs on pages 26 and 27 of the cases where we had to intervene on the direction of the processes. There may well have been an aspiration and objective to deliver housing on those sites, but if they were 1 km, 2 km or 3 km out the road and there was no certainty as to how Uisce Éireann would deliver the trunk infrastructure, the cost would be put on the individual householder, who would have to pay very significantly for that in a developer-led approach. There might be other, better locations that should come forward. Are such cases not the antithesis of planning? Is that not the very point that the Deputy and I agree on as regards looking back on these things in ten or 20 years' time with regret?

We have sadly had too many cases where we have had to implement significant retrofit investment relating to active travel, schools and community infrastructure because someone persuaded a council at a point in time to zone land in the middle of nowhere where there was no fabric. That is not consistent with proper planning and sustainable development. We have a climate crisis and compact growth. Yes, we have a housing crisis. The challenge of planning is to try to pull all of those pieces together, particularly in the context of the significant land bank still out there for development plans across the country. We have always been tracking this closely. We have a land bank that is capable of delivering, even at relatively modest densities, the equivalent of 300,000 homes. Maybe it is not always in the area with the highest demand is, but we have a lot of land out there. However, we have a bigger crisis with the co-ordination of infrastructure. There is no point in zoning land and then being at the end of a ten-year queue for enabling water services or access to infrastructure, given the funding context those utilities have to work in. Uisce Éireann works within the CRU and the funding model it has been given. I said it at the beginning and I want to be consistent: spatial planning and infrastructural planning are two sides of the one coin. One has to be joined to the other. You cannot go off on a spatial planning vision that is disconnected from the how, when and the cash of how the infrastructure is going to be delivered.