Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 11 October 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Implementing Housing for All: Discussion

Mr. Frank Curran:

I mentioned one scheme that we designed and are working on, the living over the shop scheme, and that is onsite at the moment. I mentioned the railway cottages, where, again, a lot of work has gone in with regard to the design and the heritage side in order to bring those back into place. As I mentioned earlier, there are issues with regard to the living over the shop scheme. It is difficult from the position of fire regulations, in particular because of the requirement for separate means of access. We have asked the Department to look at this in terms of the possibility of the use of sprinklers and so on, as used in other European cities, but it is difficult to bring them up to the building regulations and fire regulations. We can obviously look at other uses, for example, community uses.