Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North-West, Fianna Fail)

I express my condolences to the family of Brother Kevin Crowley and in particular his colleagues who he worked with. As a freeman of Dublin city, he was a Cork man who made a huge impact on our city. I want to acknowledge that today.

I raise bundle 3 and the Minister’s decision not to proceed with the tendering process related to that bundle. I served on Dublin City Council for ten years and for the best part of those ten years, we had public sites on which we wanted to build homes. We wanted to do that in a way that provided mixed communities. In recent years, Housing for All has given Dublin City Council the ability to build those mixed communities on those public sites through cost-rental, affordable and social housing. Across my constituency, many sites are proceeding on that basis, Oscar Traynor Road being the largest. People are delighted to see construction taking place and homes being built.

It was with some disappointment that we saw the Minister decide not to proceed with bundle 3. While that bundle included nearly 500 homes, 200 of those are in my constituency, at Shangan Road and Collins Avenue. That has an impact on the broader bundles that are outstanding, bundles 4 to 7, inclusive, because of the 4,500 housing units across the whole country, over 1,000 are in my constituency. I am, therefore, particularly concerned about the future of these bundles and their delivery.

These bundles do exactly what local authorities should be doing. They involve taking sites with complex issues, resolving those issues and putting them out to tender for construction. The Shangan Road site, for example, is a dedicated older persons’ complex. The Collins Avenue site is the Port Tunnel site which many people will have driven past. On the Church of the Annunciation site, an old church was demolished in partnership with the parish and we were able to identify potential for housing on that site. On Wellmount Road, we had a green space that was the subject of antisocial behaviour and we were able to put in place a solution. On the Collins Avenue bring centre, the DCU site, we relocated an old Dublin City Council depot, created a new one and created a site in the city. In Balcurris, we brought a number of sites together as a bundle. These are all measures the local authority has taken, on which solutions have been brought forward using the tools available in Housing for All.

We are very concerned. While we have to have value for money, we also want to see some of these sites, which have full planning permission, proceed.

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