Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Before the Minister winds up, I will compliment him on all the good work he has done in this Department. He has shown great initiative. He has been bounced around by bad luck, as has everyone else, as a result of the pandemic. It certainly has not helped the Minister to fulfil some of his expectations but I know he is working hard to maximise output in the housing industry. This legislation is forward-thinking, as are the bits and pieces that Senator Currie just mentioned on which the Minister has given promises.

I will raise one issue of which the Minister might take cognisance in the future. I refer to the national planning framework and Project Ireland 2040. We have a crisis in housing, which the Minister is certainly doing his best to work on. In Westmeath and Meath, the process of drawing up county development plans is ongoing but constraints on numbers in certain hubs and areas are causing serious complications in counties such as Westmeath, Meath and Longford. When a lot of this was put together, we were in a different place. There was a downturn in housing and an economic crisis. Much of this forward planning was carried out at that stage. As the Minister knows, it really only came to fruition in 2019 but a lot of work had gone into it over the previous five or six years. The Minister is new to his Department. This planning was done before he came into his position. I sincerely feel that Project Ireland 2040 should be reviewed and that a lot of it should be put on ice for now.

I see this all over the country in my interactions with different councillors who tell me about the complications in their own areas. In Westmeath, there are logical places to zone for development in towns like Castlepollard, Kinnegad and Rochfortbridge. I refer to infill sites, for example. I have been made aware of one particular example in Castlepollard, although I will not mention any names, in which a builder had built a certain number of houses and had given the 20% allocation to the council. We were delighted to get some housing on the back of the development. He had another 4 acres which had been dezoned under the previous development plan which he sought to have rezoned. It had all the services. He wished to build more houses which would have allowed for more social housing and housing for the general public. This application was refused as a result of the constraints under which Westmeath County Council finds itself as a result of new development plan guidelines.

This is blatantly wrong. It does not make any sense. There are crunches because of the numbers involved. The main thrust of the development plan was aimed at bigger hubs such as Athlone or Mullingar. Towns like Kinnegad, Castlepollard, Rochfortbridge and so on will suffer on the back of this. If we are serious about the divide between rural areas and the cities, we must support well-established towns in rural areas. If we do not, we will face serious problems. That is a fundamental result of the Project Ireland 2040 plan and no one will tell me otherwise because it is there to be seen. It is laid bare in all of the county development plans being drawn up across the country at present.

I know this is not totally within the terms of the debate for which the Minister is here today and I sincerely appreciate all the good work he is doing. He has been thinking outside of the box, which I hope bears fruit for him. I sincerely ask, however, that he look again at the Project Ireland 2040 plan because it is causing an untold number of problems throughout the country.