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

I thank the Rural Independents for tabling this Bill and giving us an opportunity to have an important debate about housing and planning in rural Ireland. The housing crisis is as deep in rural Ireland as it is in urban Ireland. Deputy O'Donoghue and I often speak about this in committee. There is a real challenge in islands, rural Gaeltachtaí, and in those rural areas experiencing population stagnation and decline. Small and medium size builders are not building. They cannot get finance or serviced land and it takes too long to get through planning. Self-builders find it very challenging to understand the planning rules in the system. Local authorities are not providing sufficient funding either to build social or, crucially, affordable, homes in villages, towns and rural countryside areas.

Planning is at the heart of a lot of these issues. All of the previous speakers have spoken about the challenges in the planning system. At the core of this problem is a Government which for years has refused to publish the revised and updated planning guidelines that would provide the much needed certainty Deputy O'Donoghue rightly highlights is frustrating so many people.

The Government is not assisting small and medium sized builders. It is not investing in local authorities and it is not being straight with people about planning rules. When Sinn Féin launched its alternative housing plan only five weeks ago, we set out what we would do in government to address these issues. We would publish the rural, Gaeltacht and island planning guidelines as a matter of priority. We would engage in consultation with communities and we would put the guidelines on statutory footing. At the core of our approach to planning in rural Ireland would be to give people a real opportunity to live in their own communities in a way that is socially, economically and environmentally sustainable.

We would also use the significant resources of the State through active land management and investment in social and affordable housing to give people in rural Ireland real options on whether to build their own homes, buy private homes, or to access affordable homes in a manner that is good for them, the wider community and the environment. We also made very clear that we would be far more ambitious in terms of tackling vacancy and dereliction which, again in many of the counties that the Deputies to my left represent, is a scourge that is killing the heart not just of towns and villages but rural areas. In any debate that we have about the rural housing crisis, blame for responsibility for the challenges of young people has to be laid at the door of the Government and nowhere else.

I wish to make a number of very respectful comments about the Bill. I have a different view to those expressed by some of my colleagues, but I accept they raise them because they are real live issues in their communities. The Bill before us will not achieve any of the things the Members said. I say that respectfully. The reason is that all it does is remove the prescribed status from An Taisce. It does not stop An Taisce from making observations or objections.

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