Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree with pretty much every one of the Deputy's comments about getting the balance right. We need to provide housing for young people and it must be close to the city centre, of high quality and in large numbers. The strategic housing development approach will not continue after early next year. It will be wound down and it will mean we will, correctly, have to rely on our councils to get much of this right. The council must deliver a range of other services, as well as housing, to get the balance right for good quality living. This means there should be local green space, good bus services, local shops and community centres, as well as work near by. It is balanced development, which means it is not all housing in one place and work somewhere else. We want mixed development and we can get it right.

Height is probably the most contentious issue right across the city, particularly now. We cannot keep going up. I rely a lot in this regard on the likes of Ciaran Cuffe MEP whom the Deputy will know from the council and who has real planning expertise. He makes the point that the sense of community weakens slightly when buildings go over a certain height. This is site-specific and it depends on neighbours, for example. Costs also go up when heights increase. There is a balance to be struck. This might be four, five or six storeys. Other cities do it, and the likes of Paris and Barcelona, which are historically famous, get the balance right between density and quality. There is a sense of connection or community that may be lost when we go with some of the really high developments that have been suggested.

We need density, though, and this sometimes requires difficult decisions. We also need other services that require difficult decisions. The BusConnects project is on my desk and I hope that can go to planning very shortly. That will be key in bringing down cost. For example, we do not need car parking for everyone. If we thought about this and designed projects well, we could reduce cost of apartments by not having to build expensive and extensive car parking but rather having other solutions to give people a really high quality of life. We must get that mix or balance right.

This is not easy and no one idea for what we need to do might have more virtue than another idea. I agree with the Deputy's basic premise. We need to go back, in a sense, to relying on local democratic systems in some of this planning. We should not allow a free-for-all with height. That would not work.

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