Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)

One of the most infuriating experiences parents desperate to get a childcare place for their kid have is to be told the building designated as a creche on the plans they bought their new home from actually is not going to be a creche.

They are told it has been too expensive to fit out, it is because the developer wants to rezone it as a house and sell it as such or, most infuriatingly of all, there is no demand in the area for crèche spaces.

As the Minister has said, the planning guidelines were put in place in 2001 to ensure when developers built a certain number of units, a childcare facility building was put in place but those guidelines are not fit for purpose any more. They are not providing the right number of spaces. They are also often not providing the appropriately designed buildings. When I was in the Minister's role, I put in place a process to address this to get the Department of housing to draft newer, stronger guidelines. Can the Minister give us a sense of when she expects to see those guidelines published?

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