Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Funnily enough, this is what it sounds like when the Green Party talk among themselves. We bring a different lens to issues of this kind. We have made a significant contribution in this Government to reimagining how we approach the issue of housing. We take an ecological approach or a systems-based approach where we see these things as they knit themselves together. I hope we are bringing an element of policy coherence when we discuss housing. It is not just housing alone, and it is also the Town Centre First policy, the Our Rural Future policy, Connecting Ireland, where we begin to bring public transport between those communities, and the active travel funding that helps people to move around those urban centres. All of those knit together.

Homes are a physical expression of our social fabric and they are a relatively permanent expression of that. The decisions that we make in our built environment have long-lasting consequences. In the past few decades, we have allowed ourselves to become atomised. I have to wonder if that is an expression of the economic system and the extreme individualism that we see in neocapitalism. As Deputy McAuliffe said, not all housing is created equal. Dispersed housing patterns result in fragmented communities and that locks in transport emissions. It is very interesting that there is a specific chapter in this report on transport-oriented development, which is very progressive. Dispersed housing patterns undermine local services such as public transport and the face-to-face interaction that Deputy Bacik mentioned, such as in the local shop, the local school and the local pub. It makes services such as utilities, wastewater and local road infrastructure so much more challenging to provide. It pressurises our land use patterns and makes it difficult for us to improve forestry, agriculture and renewables. It makes all of those decisions so much more difficult to implement.

The opposite is also true. Good quality urban regeneration is going to do the opposite. It is going to knit communities together, sustain the local shop, the local school, the local pub and so on, and make it hugely easier for the Government to provide high-quality public services and high-quality public transport, for example.

In addition, dealing with vacancy and dereliction can address all of these issues but also take account in a meaningful way of embodied energy, embodied carbon and the embodied heritage skills and materials that are often built into these properties. Deputy Duffy referred to that and I know the Minister of State is very strong on the idea of heritage skills being used to regenerate our vacant and derelict properties.

Deputy Ó Broin referenced the idea of both stick and carrot. I broadly agree with that in respect of taxation, although we would be at variance in our approach to local property tax. The Deputy is dead set against it but I have a concern that we do not do a good job in this country of taxing wealth.

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