Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to see that some action is being taken in the Department on foot of concerns that I hope the Minister's officials have raised with him because I have certainly raised them with the officials over the past year or two. I would like to know when the decision to carry out this exercise was taken because we have been told over the past number of years that everything was in hand in the Department and that the list published in 2015 was what we would need. In fact, many of them are not yet built. The Minister is now the Minister who is bringing back prefabs. He is doing that because there was no forward planning in the Department and he has been left holding that particular baby because forward planning seemed to have been abolished until some of us started to raise it in this House.

I raised the example of a site in Ashbourne privately with the Minister and I know his officials are looking at it. This site is owned by the Department. I hope some of it will be used for a public park but the vast bulk of it was designated by the Department and the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government as suitable for housing despite the fact that anybody who drove through Ashbourne would see the houses that were being built and the families moving into the area and see that undoubtedly a school would be needed there at some point in the future. However, the Department of Education and Skills saw fit to put this forward for housing.

Is it the case that the only information sought from local authorities about housing developments concerned the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, scheme, which the Minister mentioned yesterday, rather than all the housing developments that are happening, the vast majority of which are not LIHAF?

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