Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I meant to say it at the start but on behalf of the Regional Group I want to extend our sympathies to the family of the late Brendan Daly, a man who I met on a number of occasions. May he rest in peace.

I want to come back to the Tánaiste's reply. He said the Government has to drill down into it and he spoke about a strategy for building houses. We all know that the private housing market is dysfunctional. Anybody who is building houses will say that, apart from people who are building apartment blocks in the cities. If you take developers who might be looking at land, the first place they will go is to the local authority to see if it is interested in buying the houses off them when they are finished. I acknowledge that a lot of local authority houses are being built, including in Galway East, but if you take a town like Tuam, we have not had any substantial private housing development since 2007, and Athenry would be the same way. We have bits and pieces happening but we do not have the substantial developments that we need.

We are doing a local area plan for these places and we do not seem to get that we are zoning lands and that the status quoremains. In some cases we are dezoning lands. The other thing we are doing is R2 phasing, which is daft because it means the land cannot be built on or sold as development land, and yet the Government is talking about putting residential tax on it, which I hope the Government will change. There is no common sense in this. If we do not tackle this now, we will end up in five years still wondering why we are not building enough houses in areas where they are needed for young families to buy at affordable prices.

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