Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I spoke to someone recently who made the wise point that good motives can sometimes bring about unintended consequences. The example given was that the valid reaction at the turn of the 19th century to the housing problems in Dublin — the chronic illnesses that arose from the slums — was to spread the city out in order to get people enjoying space and fresh air. There were valid health reasons. Cholera and typhoid are not that distant in the folk memory of Dublin — neither, I am sure, are they distant memories in Cork, Galway and other cities.

One of the consequences is that we have sprawled so far out that it is no longer working in transport terms. We need to bring our cities back in, to start creating urban living spaces that work well. That is not to return to the 17th or 18th centuries and some of the chronic housing conditions that existed in those times. To a certain extent, however, some of the new developments are heading in that direction, such is the lack of quality. If we are to create healthy, compact, high density urban spaces which are positive places to live in, then we need to get two or three things right. We need to have proper light. We do not want flats or apartments with no south facing windows, such as are being built in this city at present. These are not high quality of life places in which to live. We need clean air. We cannot have the situation where when one opens a window there is a smell of toxic fumes. Perhaps one of the most important goals, however, is to create urban centres which are quiet.

This may be done in clever ways in terms of not facing buildings onto a road or exposing them to noise, which makes life intolerable and where the windows cannot be opened. That may seem to be a small thing, but actually it is crucial. Politicians more than anybody know that in walking around streets in urban neighbourhoods the biggest environmental threat is noise. As a politician one notices the difference between a quiet and a noisy street. We need good quality design to get people back into high quality sustainable urban communities. That means considering noise, having proper monitoring and all the type of enforcement measures that are set out in this Bill.

Everyone here has talked about the experience of noise as a problem. For those in the apartments being built in this city at the moment, the single biggest noise issue is that everything that is going on in the flat next door may be heard because there is no sound proofing. Changing that reality and improving that design quality would do more than anything else to improve the quality of life for a great many people in this city. It is that type of clever environmental thinking that should be brought into our buildings, transport and housing policies, which create cities that work and become leading world centres rather than places where the quality of life is poor.

I commend my colleague, Deputy Cuffe, on bringing forward this legislation and the parties opposite, on accepting it, in a broad sense. If we are serious about creating good urban spaces where local environments are looked after, we should pursue this Bill with great haste before another 1,000 apartments are built where noise from the next door neighbour and the road outside may be heard.

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