Results 25,101-25,120 of 27,080 for speaker:Richard Boyd Barrett

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: Maybe I am not fully understanding some of the points made, but, for me, this is a simple matter. The amendment relates to section 54(3)(n). Section 54 deals with considerations for the issuance of a national planning statement. It is not just about what the planner may or may not consider. This is about what prompts a Minister to issue a national planning statement. That is my problem...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: The amendments we have tabled, and the amendment from Deputy O'Callaghan, are trying to do similar things. The Minister will probably say they could be done anyway and that the Bill as drafted will allow for all of this. Our point is it will also allow for the Minister not to do it. In the areas we are specifying, we do not believe it is an option not to do it. I will repeat an instance...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: We have learned a lot from making some big mistakes and failing some pretty important categories of people, and these are very much planning issues. We thought they were not but they actually are. The point and logic of these amendments is to say that we need to learn from our mistakes in doing planning and development. We cannot, as we did in the past, essentially allow general types of...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I am saying this specifically as a planning matter. I am not talking about the Minister's policy.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: We can discuss that another day. I am talking about how the planning system has failed to play its very important part in ensuring that we meet these incredibly important social goals and plan for them. They were not even considered planning matters. They cannot be optional extras any more. They have to be imperatives as part of the planning and development of our society and communities....

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I would bend the stick on this one and say I do not see the point in planning permission being given for developments which 80% to 90% of the population could not possibly afford at this point. I just do not see the point in that. Is that approach to planning and development not really what, in the end, led to the Celtic tiger crash? We were building three times what we are building now....

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (5 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: What numbers are those amendments?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (5 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: Amendment No. 712?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (5 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I have a point that is specifically on the amendments. The whole point of a development plan is that it is democratically decided, so contravening it is a serious matter. I would be interested to hear Deputy Matthews come back on this. The amendments suggest this should be overridden because we have climate objectives, or that this might be allowed. On the one hand, it is imperative, but...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I am saying that in developing national frameworks, planning statements or development plans - any of these processes for planning and development - there should be a specific requirement to look at social and affordable housing need. To date, and what is being proposed here, we only look at housing need. There is no requirement to break it down in terms of the types of housing and I think...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (7 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: On amendment No. 204, one of the most horrific reminders of the need to get the issue of providing culturally appropriate and decent accommodation for Travellers and its link to planning is the tragedy in Carrickmines, which is in my area, where ten Travellers lost their lives in 2015. One reason that fire happened was the Carrickmines site was exempt from fire and planning regulations as it...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I strongly support this amendment for many of the reasons that have been set out. I will give a very good current example of why we should have this zoning, namely, the Jurys Hotel site. It is an outrage that this site has been lying idle in the teeth of an enormous housing crisis where hundreds of desperate asylum seekers living in tents on Mount Street are being treated despicably. Huge...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I am speaking to the amendment. I thank the Chair.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: That site should have been zoned exclusively for affordable and-or social housing. It should not be allowed to be another US embassy that we do not need or, for that matter, to be used for unaffordable housing, which it could have been at one stage when Seán Dunne had some outrageous plan for it. The site should have been seen as strategically important and should have been...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: The arguments have largely been made but on the flipping of land, it is worth mentioning the Cherrywood development. The main investor bought it for a song. Let us remind ourselves - the biggest residential development site in the country was bought by a wealth asset management company which sat on it for quite a long period and then started to flip the sites. That is what caused the...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I think the Minister of State indicated in his response to the amendment that the promotion of culture, cultural space and infrastructure was a matter of policy rather than planning. I strongly disagree with him on that. I will give a concrete example I came upon when I was given a fantastic tour in the last week of the emerging Cherrywood development in our area. The town centre is...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: From what did the Minister of State quote?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: To put it very simply, a strategy for culture and a requirement to provide cultural spaces in the development of an area are two related but different things. You can have a fantastic aspirational strategy and commitment to doing things but then not actually have the places and spaces to do them and it is not a requirement in the development of an area that those things be provided for and...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: I am a signatory to this series of amendments. The points have largely been made and we have somewhat discussed the matter previously. The natural restoration of biodiversity is key, as I am sure the Minister of State knows. To take forestry as an example, many of the attempts to increase afforestation turned out to be failures or even damaging because they were based on things such as...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Planning and Development Bill 2023: Committee Stage (Resumed) (19 Mar 2024)

Richard Boyd Barrett: As a signatory to this, the point has been well aired but do we have planning and development that is mechanical or do we have planning and development that is holistic? That is really what is at stake here. If planning and development is mechanical and economically deterministic, it treats people like units and robots and the result is probably best summed up in Edvard Munch's famous...