Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government needs to be honest about the number of housing units being built each year. It was very clear during the general election campaign that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael clearly told untruths about the number of housing units that would be build in 2024 by many thousands. It is clear the information was at hand and directly contradicted the figure of 40,000.

Section two talks about the economic and social impacts of housing and we can see the damage caused by Government’s continued failure to address the housing crisis. We are losing highly qualified and professional people to the rest of the world. We need them to stay at home, and those who have left home to be able to come back to Ireland. I will give an example. There is a new development called Luttrellstown Gate – a lovely name - in Clonsilla. A three-bedroom, mid-terrace house starts at half a million euro. A four-bedroom, semi-detached home costs close to €800,000. How can our young people afford to stay at home, or to come home?

Another recommendation was promoting earlier and more effective participation by the public in the planning system. The planning system is constantly under attack and it is not under attack to make it fairer and more effective in terms of public consultation, it is under attack to make it easier for developers to get planning through. I will give an example of how the current planning system works. There is a development in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre in Dublin 15 that is a 16-storey building proposed by Goldman Sachs - not a small developer or one short of funds in any shape or form. When the planning application was put forward we discovered the council had been engaging in pre-planning with the developer for two years while the community was treated like mushrooms and kept in the dark. The community then had the statutory few weeks to assess the planning application and put in submissions with absolutely no help or funding, no meetings with planners, and because it was a live application councillors and TDs are not allowed, by law, to even talk about it. Can the Minister see how unfair this is on local communities? I will bring that recommendation further and request that funding is provided to local communities to allow them to realistically put comprehensive submissions in for such massive developments.

There are a huge number of recommendations and unfortunately we only have a couple of minutes each. It is such a disgrace we do not have more time - we have just a couple of hours - for such a document. We cannot leave the housing sector to the private market because we know where that has left us.

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