Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 4 November 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage
Unlocking Barriers to the Delivery of Housing: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. David Caffrey:
I will keep it very short. In respect of the UDZs, the first thing that needs to be done is to identify them, as was correctly stated, at scale, because that process can often take up to six months. Let us start identifying them now. The second big thing, obviously, is partnering with the infrastructure providers. No matter how we try to kick-start the UDZ process, it is going to take time to come to realisation and fruition. A large part of the reason behind that will be the infrastructure and so partnering with those infrastructure providers upfront is important. The final point echoes what Mr. Benson said about the collaborative approach between local authorities, the development community and the communities within which we would look to ultimately provide these UDZs. That is where I feel SDZs maybe fell away a bit. It took a while to bed in the community engagement piece. If we can start identifying sites and commence the engagement really early, we can kick-start that programme a bit, but I caution that it will take time.