Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)

To echo what my colleague has said, there is a need for a very clear plain language explanation of what is the rationale behind these changes. I was at the committee last week and while there is clearly a need to make changes they need to be explained. It is very frustrating for us as new TDs to come in here when we had heard from the previous Government, which the Minister was part of, that essentially the biggest piece of work on planning in decades and decades, possibly since the foundation of the State, had been done, and yet here we are now, back again, making changes that are opaque and unclear. What is the outcome going to be?

Fianna Fáil has been in control of the Ministry of housing since 2020. We are now six years in, and there are still planning issues that have not been dealt with, and I know there are more coming down the line. What it says to me is that Fianna Fáil has not taken this seriously. Neither has Fine Gael. They have not got on top of it. I read through the infrastructure plan released today and at least it had the honesty of saying that at least six of the 12 biggest barriers and blockages to the delivery of infrastructure are down to the Government itself, the State itself and how they operate, including slow processes, slow approvals and funding uncertainty. What we need to hear is what change these regulations are going to make, and particularly around the issue of land that will be zoned, as I have raised with the Minister before.

We are going to zone more land for housing development but there are already significant amounts of zoned land across the country. We have 80,000 planning permissions that are not being built. The issue is not lack of zoning; it is the lack of development led by the State. We are going to inflate land prices, lead to speculation and ultimately come back to the housing needs and demands assessment, having excluded the half a million people stuck in their childhood bedrooms. Are they going to be included in the new housing needs and demand assessment? Is their housing need going to be included, and is the need of all those in hidden homelessness going to be included? These are the questions that need to be answered on this.

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