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

That is not against Dublin but Dublin is under such pressure at the moment because so much of the development is happening on the east coast. We need better-balanced regional development.

That will not happen in Cork, Limerick, Galway or Waterford just by zoning ever-outwards which has been the characteristic of development. It will happen by the measures the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, is introducing with the State intervening not just in social housing but also through the Land Development Agency. Development happening around Colbert Station in the centre of Limerick is a very good example of how we are under-using land in the centre. It is not a shortage of zoned land. It is a shortage of good planning and good strategic thinking. The benefit of the compact approach where one goes back to the centre is that it is by nature low carbon. We do not have to keep building out new water and other infrastructure.

That is another key element of what I have learned by going round the country listening to councils. Clare is an example. Why is it that we are not building new housing in those 51 or so perfect towns and villages in Clare that are ripe for development and where we have the schools, the church and the pub? It is because we need to ramp up Irish Water and its investment in the infrastructure within existing towns and villages that would help us to deliver houses in those areas.

The sort of funding that the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, is providing helps to provide some of that infrastructure. In cases where developers cannot make a business case for it, the State directly invests to support some of the projects getting built. That is the way of tackling it, and not by going down the road of zoning everything. That is what happened in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and got us into a housing crisis. It was a developer-led approach. We do not need to do that. We need a plan-led approach with the State in a central role working with developers rather than for them.

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