Mr. Paul Sheridan:

In the last couple of decades the EU has really started bringing in significant directives and regulations so the likes of a pumping station, built underground that nobody can see, now requires planning permission. That pumping station and a pipe in the ground could open up land to connect 50 houses but, right now, it has to go through planning and it takes time to go through the planning process. That was not the case previously. The Department of housing released a paper and a proposal to exempt certain elements of that type of development. Those are the types of things that can speed up the delivery of homes around the country. We can broaden that out. When we legislate for something like the metro or the greater Dublin main drainage scheme, we do so because if we have 1 million extra people over the next 30 years, they have to have jobs and homes. This brings in the whole concept of data centres as well. Data centres are not a nice-to-have thing for the private sector. They are going to be the backbone of every modern economy in the world, and if we do not maintain our competitiveness, we are going to lose it and then we will lose jobs. Those jobs are important because they help to support the economy, which generates the tax revenue which is then available to the Government to continue to invest in public infrastructure like bridges. We cannot look at these things in isolation. What we are asking for is predictability. We should exempt what is critical infrastructure to support development. Housing is connected to FDI, to bridges and to schools. They are all together. We are looking at infrastructure and we are the enablers. Gives us the predictability in the process