Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

The Minister made a comment earlier that this is the size of the apartments in Austria. Will people pay the same rents? The Minister might check that out for us because I can tell him they will not. If he is making a comparison he should make the whole comparison. My big worry is there is a major development going in Cork's docklands. We are looking at maybe 10,000 units. The Minister was there, as was I, and the Taoiseach was there talking about this vision for the Cork docklands. My serious concern is when what the Minister is proposing today comes in, we may be looking at redesigns of the type of apartment and tenure mix that will be going in there. This could be an iconic situation in Cork, but it could also turn into social housing mini-apartments and down the road we will have antisocial behaviour, deprivation and lack of investment.

The Minister made a point earlier about all the money the Government has invested in parks, playgrounds and public spaces. I live on the northside of Cork city and there has been virtually nothing. There are no regional parks in the north west or the north east. They have far below the level of parks and playgrounds there are in other parts of the country. If we are going to be delivering the Cork docklands and the Minister is saying the developers and builders are not going to be putting in the shared spaces, then those spaces have to go in first because they never go in afterwards. We saw that during the Celtic tiger. Houses were built all over the place with no services, no shared spaces, no schools, no crèches and then everyone wanted to know why we had major problems in some of these communities. The buck stopped with those Governments in the same way it will stop with this Government.

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