Paudie Coffey (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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I welcome Mr. Skehan to the committee and wish him well with his appointment. It is early days for him and the new agency but he will agree that it will play an important role on oversight, independent advice and co-ordination of housing and sustainability policy.

Mr. Skehan mentioned planning earlier and much of what happens now will be retrospective and reactive to the bad planning that occurred nationally. Mr. Skehan is charged with bringing forward advice based on research on how to make communities more sustainable, which is very important. He will liaise with other agencies, including the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and others, which have done good ground work. It is important the work which has been done is co-ordinated in a consistent fashion. For example, there is a great deal of inconsistency across local authorities on housing policy. While I recognise that there are varying demands on different local authorities in areas like Traveller accommodation and homelessness, I ask Mr. Skehan to examine the existing housing stock of all local authorities in some research document at some stage. What is the age of that stock, how sustainable is it and how amenable is it to future needs in the context of projected demographic change? There are new social demands on local authorities, which are not building houses anymore. There will be an important role for the agency in that context to bring forward advice on how to meet those demands.

There has been a great deal of inconsistency and a failure to develop work on housing, transport, education and sustainable living within communities. The agency might have a role to play in developing shared solutions across different agencies. One thinks of energy and renewable technology, about which we speak a great deal now.

In the midlands alone, there are proposals for new wind farms but they are proving quite controversial. There are also ancient or old hydropower schemes. In Portlaw in County Waterford, more than 300 kW of power was generated in my community in the 1800s. Zero kilowatts of hydropower are being generated in that community today. They are the kind of areas this committee and the Housing and Sustainable Communities Agency need to look at to resurrect these technologies that were there before and to integrate them into communities again.

I welcome Mr. Skehan's appointment and wish him well. I look forward to him coming back when he has had a chance to put his feet under the table, do some research and bring forward tangible advice of which we can all take account.