Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein)

I apologise for coming in late.

However, I have read everything and I was watching. There were two things. Members mentioned the serviced sites. Going back a long time, I remember when you could purchase serviced sites from the local authority. One of Sinn Féin's housing policies suggested we go back to that and that each council would provide the serviced sites. The purchaser would pay the building costs and that stock would remain in the council because technically the council owned the site. The purchaser paid for the house that was built on it but it could reduce the cost by €120,000 to €150,000 of the purchase price. People said it was a bit silly because the purchaser would never own it. They would actually own the house and could sell it but only at market value. It would back to the council, the local authority or whatever, and that would keep the stock in situ the whole time. Has the Department looked at that proposal?

There is another thing I am worried about. I am based in east Cork, which is fairly sparse from Mitchelstown to Fermoy. It goes all the way over to Cobh and all the way down to Youghal. In the last county development plan, Cork County Council said that, as its stands, Whitegate is maxed out, so there will not be any more houses built there. I suspect we will have a similar problem in other towns around the country. As elected representatives, we have access to a thing called the constituency dashboard, which is census information. Do any of those here today or any entity, as a housing body, have similar access? The reason I ask this is that my bugbear is workforce planning. This is the same for school transport and disability services. The information is in the dashboard through the census. It is possible to come up with a five or ten year plan because one can see where it is going, whether additional disability spaces will be needed in schools or whether there will be greater demand on public transport and that all goes with housing and access. That is my first question.

We talk about affordable housing. I was just with Enable Ireland and Rehab Care. Nobody seems to talk about people with disabilities. I remember sitting on Cork County Council maybe 12 years ago. We would talk about building so many social and affordable houses but you would also have to have ones that were wheelchair accessible. Has that gone because houses seem to be getting narrower and higher? Those are my two questions.