Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I warmly support this amendment and ask the Minister to accept it. It would require him to come back to us to identify some of the fundamental issues around supply, which is obviously the critical background to the outrageous rent gauging we have seen over the past several years. The amendment attempts to deal with that.

In my constituency, on the north fringe of Dublin City Council and on the south fringe of Fingal County Council, planning permission has been granted for thousands of units over the years but the sites remain undeveloped. The plans made at the turn of the century for the major new urban district of north Dublin involving 30,000 units, comparable to a city the size of Waterford, have simply not happened. It was because we depended on the developer-banking led model of housing development. Yesterday, on Leaders' Questions, the Tánaiste in reply to Deputy Mary Lou McDonald said there would be 18,000 completions this year. The Department's website states there have been 11,700 completions up to October this year. We were predicting, hopefully, that it would be up to between 13,500 and 14,000.

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