Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I will now speak to amendment No. 45. Again, this is just an opportunity to raise four very important areas which many of us had hoped would be included in this Bill. During the interactions we had in the committee last year when Maria Graham and the team come in to speak to us, we had flagged some issues we thought should be part of the review and ultimately part of the Bill. I was also working on amendments in these areas to submit before Committee Stage but did not get a chance. I reserve the right to introduce amendments on Report Stage. I will go through them briefly and individually.

We have had two very significant reports from the Law Reform Commission on the reform of compulsory purchase order, CPO, one of which was in the past year. It is very important research. CPO is a very slow and a very expensive process for our local authorities, whether it is acquisition of land or of vacant properties. Given the Government's stated aim of wanting to be more assertive in tackling vacancy, dereliction and unused land, this seems to be a really important opportunity. There appears, however, to be very little change in that section of the Bill relating to appropriations, which is at the end. Is the Government in any way considering bringing forward amendments to this Bill, either on Report Stage or in the Seanad, on CPO reform or will that be another piece of legislation? If so, when?

The second issue is the land value sharing tax. I suspect this fell victim to a very large amount of lobbying and the electoral cycle being upon us. I am not asking the Minister of State to comment on that but is there any update he can give us on it? Will it be a stand-alone Bill or will there be an attempt to insert it into this legislation after the local elections, for example?

The third issue is a real frustration for many of us. The Minister of State's predecessor, Deputy Damien English, worked very closely with this committee on selecting a really good expert group on Traveller accommodation with three absolutely expert individuals. They deliberated, they consulted and they met with our committee on a number of occasions in the previous Oireachtas. They produced a report with 32 recommendations. A number of those recommendations would require legislative reform in planning. They are absolutely key to unblocking the continued scandal of the failure of our local authorities to provide culturally appropriate Traveller-specific accommodation. It would have made eminent sense to have them in this Bill and it would not have been a huge amount of work. I am interested know why they are not included in this Bill. Is there any plan on Report Stage, or when the Bill is before the Seanad, to address that?

It is ironic that we were talking about the Irish Green Building Council's manifesto launch tomorrow on embodied carbon in the built environment, as my last point concerns this topic. Our committee did what I thought was a very good piece of work and published a report, which was forwarded to the Department last year. It is one of the big frustrations for many of us that when the officials from the Department came in to talk to us, for example, about whether there will be changes to planning legislation, building control, greater integration of transport or development into planning, or changes to public procurement particularly to ensure lower embodied carbon building materials, there was a sense that the Department and the Government were waiting for work at an EU level to conclude in 2027. Some European jurisdictions, for example, Denmark and France, have already started to move ahead and made very significant advances in this area. That issue of the whole life of carbon quantification and assessment is key. The Minister of State does not need me to tell him that if we continue to make progress on the renewable energy side, then embodied carbon in the built environment is going to become an ever greater feature in greenhouse gas emissions. There are things that could be done now in the legislation of planning in that regard. I refer to some of the recommendations from our own report, such as demolition audits, the reuse requirements where demolition takes place so that valuable building material does not go into landfill, the need for some system of quantification, authorising planning authorities to make decisions based on volumes of embodied carbon used in building materials, and changes to public procurement, specifically mandates to use lower carbon cement and more environmentally friendly products, including timber-based products. It appears to be such a missed opportunity. I will have significant amendments on this area on Report Stage, and my colleagues in the Seanad will do likewise, where this Bill could have addressed all of that. The fact it is not doing so means in real terms it will be 2026, 2027, 2028 or 2029 before we start tackling these issues, if at all.

I am keen for the Minister of State to respond to the cluster of questions on these four key areas of planning reform that are absent in this Bill.