Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It has a great deal to do with ceiling height. The ceiling in a prison cell is much lower than in a house. That was done to psychologically damage the prisoners but they failed in that.

I have raised another important issue with the Minister of State and the previous Minister, Mr. Hogan, and I would like the senior officials who are present to come back to me on this. There is an issue regarding the use of plaster slabs to separate apartments. They have concrete floors of a specific thickness to separate each deck but I have visited apartments blocks, which I can take the officials to see, where studded partitions were used to divide the plaster slabs. There are a number of problems with that. The first is the lack of privacy as everything going on in the apartments either side can be heard. What is happening in an apartment two doors down can even be heard. If one is in No. 20, one can hear what is going on in No. 22. It is not nice that families have no privacy whatsoever. There is also a fire safety concern. I raised this with the Department a number of years ago when I was a county councillor and it sent me a diagram outlining how safe the complex was and where the fire would go between the plaster slabs and so on. I do not buy that. I have not travelled the world that much but in the dozen or so countries I have visited, I have never entered an apartment where the party wall was hollow; they were all concrete. We have to get away from hollow walls. We cannot put people in apartments like this. The least we can do is ensure they are separated by a minimum nine inch solid wall. The Government has the power to push this legislation through this evening. I am taking off my party hat and I ask the Minister of State to do the same. More and more people will live in apartments in the future for the reasons outlined by the previous two speakers. The population is increasing and we need to give people security, privacy and safety. Plaster slabs are not safe because they are a fire risk. Apartments currently do not afford privacy because every noise in the surrounding apartments can be heard and they are not secure. I canvassed in an apartment complex in which the units were sold for big money. One guy had a row with a fellow living in another apartment and he put his foot through the wall. I was shocked when I saw this. That is not conducive to proper living and the least we can do if people are forced to live in apartments is ensure they are separated by solid walls. The Minister of State does not have to give me a complete response tonight but I would like him to come back on that. I make that appeal sincerely.

In former eastern bloc countries, apartments are large and they have large balconies but where groups of three or four blocks are sited together, they have play areas in between the towers. Parents or whoever is minding the children can congregate there with the children but they also have parklands nearby. Reference is often made to conditions in the Soviet Union and I was not a fan of the command economy but they thought through their planning and development policies. In some areas, there were large parks where people could get fresh air. Apartments in this State should be located in strategic zones with recreational areas, which provide two levels of recreation - small areas for children where parents can meet and play with the children and larger parks like the Phoenix Park. Perhaps they should not be as big as that but I have seen huge parks near developments in eastern European countries.

Significantly more apartments will be built in future. Some of those constructed in the noughties were shocking and they need to be pulled down. What developers got away with was nothing short of criminal. They led officials and politicians by the nose and wrote the script. They landed in helicopters accompanied by architects and engineers and anybody who opposed or questioned what they were doing was told he or she was anti-jobs. That was a load of nonsense. We are all pro-good jobs but we have to think about where people live because that affects them psychologically and this has been proven time and again. While the Minister of State thought my reference to Long Kesh was funny, I mentioned it to illustrate that if people are living in confined spaces with low ceilings, they can be affected negatively by that. Apartments do not need to have ceilings that are 10 ft. or 15 ft. high but they should be similar to that in a standard three-bedroom house. The low ceiling height was deliberately planned by the boyos who designed the Kesh for a reason. Let us not allow developers to build apartments with ceilings lower than the standard height of 8 ft. 6 in. and let us try to maintain that because people need breathing space.

I support the amendment.

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