Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I wish to raise another housing issue that has not been addressed amidst all the hullabaloo in the past ten days about rural planning guidelines, that is the problem of affordability and housing in urban areas. Unless one is lucky enough to own a site or for one's family to own a patch of land it is very difficult for those living in villages, towns and cities to provide housing for themselves and their families.

There is a real blind spot in Government policy in terms of the lack of recognition of the problems of housing in urban areas. For every site and every house that is built in the open countryside there is a significant level of frustration building up among people who want to house themselves and their families in urban areas. The Government could be doing more. It could provide sites and well managed plots of land close to the heart of our villages, on under-used land in our cities, or on surplus institutional land in towns.

There is a significant amount of land, not out in the open countryside but close to schools, pubs, shops and to the heart of our communities that could have well designed schemes built on it. I appeal to the Government to spend more time looking at what can be achieved close to the heart of where communities want to be. I urge the Government to look again at Part V and to put back in the provisions that were filleted out of the 2000 Act in late 2002. The provisions taken out would have provided enough funding to give people roofs over their heads. There is now only a smattering of housing coming up under Part V. As a previous speaker pointed out, the argument that it takes time is good enough for one or two years but not three years on and seven years after the Government came to office.

The Government must do more with the provisions of the Planning and Development Act. It must provide a spectrum of housing options for people and allow for flats to be sold. People are living in local authority accommodation whose parents and grandparents grew up in the flats in which they live. These people do not have a chance to buy them outright. It makes them uneasy and unhappy that they are looking at new apartments being built to the left and right of them while they know they have no chance of buying the roof over their head. People should be given that right, whether it be in Mounttown, Ringsend or the north inner city. Those people wish to be the heart of their communities and the Minister is not doing enough to allow them to buy their flats. I look forward to provisions being put in place to allow people to buy their homes.

The Minister must also do more in regard to quality. I foresee that in a couple of years the European Union will again take a case against Ireland because the Minister is dragging his heals on the building performance directive. Why does he not introduce it from 1 January next year? Why does he not give all new homes as well as those that come on the market an energy rating?

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