Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Unfortunately, the Minister did not have time to address the key issues in the two amendments I focused on in my remarks. One has to ask oneself why the Government is afraid of putting the NPF to a vote in the Houses of the Oireachtas. City and county development plans and local area plans are voted on by elected local government members. The NPF is the overarching plan that sits on top of that hierarchy. It should have the democratic imprimatur of this House, first, because it is the right thing to do and, second, because it would give it a legitimacy and a buy-in from the political parties, Deputies and Senators who vote for it. That was always the intention going back to the original legislation. Not having the Oireachtas voting on the NPF is not only wrong from a democratic accountability point of view; it also makes the NPF legally weaker. As a consequence of that, where there are conflicts between development plans and the NPF and its national policy objectives, which we will discuss under some of the later groupings, there will be some difficulty.

My focus today is on the Bill itself and I do not necessarily want to go beyond it. However, I must point out that it is not factually accurate for the Minister to say 4,000 affordable homes were delivered last year. That is incorrect. Approximately 1,500 affordable homes were delivered by local authorities, approved housing bodies, AHBs, and the Land Development Agency, LDA, many of which, of course, are not actually affordable. Almost half the remainder were approvals for people to draw down shared equity loans they had not drawn down. They are not affordable homes. Even in the case of people who did draw down their shared equity first home loans, those homes were not affordable. It behoves all of us to try to be accurate. We had this exchange previously. When the Government hits 4,000 genuinely affordable homes, I will welcome and acknowledge that. It came nowhere close to it last year, and the Minister knows it.

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