Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is an overriding need to get empty units back into use. I do not have a problem with the Irish Water side of things. On change of use, the overriding imperative is to get over-the-shop units into use. There are many such units in Dún Laoghaire. In fact, there are dozens of them and they could be used to provide much-needed accommodation.

I appreciate the fact that officials from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government contacted me we to discuss this matter. However, I was not entirely satisfied with the answers I received about how we will ensure that the safety and building regulations and standards will be policed and guaranteed, and that there will be checks and enforcement to ensure that these buildings are up to standard. We know that there are plenty of landlords who are quite happy to allow people to exist in squalid, sometimes horrific, conditions, often in damp apartments. There are landlords who are very capable of allowing people to rent in these circumstances and we must have guarantees that this will not be allowed to happen and that this will be genuinely policed by local authorities, given the exceptional nature of waiving planning permission in this regard. Will the Minister of State give us assurances on this?

What will we do when controversial planning applications are submitted? Take the current example of Bullock Harbour, where there was significant opposition to a completely inappropriate development. That opposition led to the submission of a second planning application, which included supposedly marine-related commercial units in an effort to neutralise opposition to excessive residential development. Is it the case that a developer could choose to not use those for commercial purposes and a year later say that they are being changed to residential even when this flies in the face of the reason for which planning permission was originally given?

On antennae, the issues have already been raised about people's concerns. How can the real concerns that communities have on this matter be addressed?

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