Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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I appreciate that, and there is a mention of that further on in the Bill but that kind of misses the point. What I am saying is that in planning in general, in addition to social housing and particularly affordable purchase and cost-rental schemes, the key aim of the planning system should be to make sure that housing is affordable for people. If you go back to the first principles of planning and when it was introduced, it was never the intention of the planning system to make housing less affordable for people but that has actually been an unintended consequence. What the planning system does is it restricts development, and for very good, rational reasons because there are real costs if you just have housing development everywhere. I do not need to rehearse the issues around that. I think we all understand the need for compact growth and to align housing with proximity to employment, education, sustainable transport and all these different things. You cannot have a free-for-all. There are huge costs or consequence if you do that. However, when planning was introduced, it was never intended that it would restrict access to housing so much that it would make unaffordable for a huge number of people.

When planning was started, going back to town planning and looking at the garden cities, not only was the first one, namely, Letchworth Garden City, in the UK, but Marino was based on it. Our original town planning here was based on all this. It was not just about providing good quality housing, good amenities and good open spaces but affordability was a key priority for planning. That somehow has been lost from the overall planning system over the years. It should be absolutely fundamental and written into everything at a high level. In addition to what we are doing with social housing, affordable purchase, cost rental, which I do not think is enough anyway, affordability throughout the entire planning system should be a key consideration.