Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is more than a year since I was elected before which I was on the county council for six years. This was brought to the House today by the Labour Party. While Deputy Kelly was in government and was the Minister with responsibility for housing, he had a track record like the LDA - he did not build a bloody house. This is what we are coming down to. The records are there to show Labour's double standards. Here today, its Members are saying, "Let us look at this", but while they were in government, they did nothing about it.

Limerick needs 1,000 houses built per year, as announced by the Limerick chamber of commerce, and we set up Limerick 2030 to help us build these houses. What has Limerick 2030 got that the LDA does not have? The LDA has a national problem but we need these houses implemented locally. On Limerick 2030, we have council representatives and local authority representatives whose job is to produce houses for the city and county, which they are doing, and there are 250 planning permissions in at present to build houses at Mungret. It is also investing in towns and villages in our county. However, this Government and successive Governments have never invested one penny in infrastructure so that a house can be built in the towns and villages of the county. That is a failure of the Labour Party, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and now the Green Party, which are making it impossible for people who want to build houses to get planning permission to build houses, and build them without putting any pressure on the local authorities.

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