Naoise Ó Muirí (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise youth facilities. Deputy Currie mentioned all the important facilities we need to make available, including youth cafes, youth clubs, skate parks, music clubs and astro pitches. These are the best ways to divert younger people, get them engaged and keep them involved in the community. In our area, there was a fabulous plan 20 years ago to build many community facilities into the north fringe but then the crash came along and all the building activity stopped. It has recently started up again but there is absolutely no plan, with the exception of a small element to be done by the city council, to comprehensively build community facilities there before it is too late and the population density gets too large and all those children get older.

I have a couple of issues to mention. The first is that there is a lot of social housing, AHB, development happening at present but as I understand it, they are exempt from section 48 development levies. The very tool a local authority like the city council or others would use to fund the installation of community facilities upfront is not available to them. The Government needs to try to fix that. Equally, I recall visiting a couple of projects a few years ago in our area and URDF funding where Dublin communities were effectively locked out of this funding. It was not available to Dublin communities. The only way we could do a particular project at the time seemed to be through the sports capital programme - which, by the way, is very welcome and it is vital that we keep those sports capital grant calls coming - or an active travel programme and this did not fit into the active travel model. It was not active travel; it was a place in the community we wanted to renew. Those community facilities are really practical and important; we just need capital and money to build them upfront rather than at the end.

The LDA is getting involved in the north fringe in Clongriffin and again, I am hoping to meet agency officials, as I am sure others will. It is so important the LDA, as a State agency, is building and planning those community facilities upfront for the north fringe, Clongriffin and all those areas.

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