Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Minister of State coming here today. It has been quite a while since we met in County Kilkenny. I congratulate him on his elevation to this great office.

The Project Ireland 2040 plan goes a long way back and much work has been done on it. Its inception was to iron out some of the problems that may have arisen in the previous plan. It is not just from a development point of view but I fundamentally believe there are serious cracks in this plan, which will unfold in an extreme manner over the next year or two.

I will give one example where I was contacted by a Longford-Westmeath constituent. The Minister of State is familiar with a town called Castlepollard in which there was a development called Cluain Mullan, which is an estate of 30-odd houses. The developer built out his first section of 22 houses and followed on with another eight houses. Between social housing and affordable housing, Westmeath County Council and the community benefited by approximately ten houses out of that 30, which was a great success.

Part of the field, however, was heretofore zoned. It was de-zoned under the previous monster plan to de-zone all these lands that were not in use. This shows an example of a builder who was on a site building but whose lands were de-zoned. He is the only active builder in Castlepollard at present. It is a provincial town, which are graded on their size and development. It is called a grade 3, or category 3, from a development point of view.

This guy can build; he has the wherewithal and he is on site. The development plan has come up in County Westmeath; that is my example. Perhaps, he has four acres left in his field, which was previously zoned but has been taken out. The councillors in Westmeath sought to put it back in, and under the new national framework, Westmeath County Council has said there can be no further developments in towns such as Castlepollard, Kinnegad or all these different towns.

The amount of stuff that has been rejected includes small, piecemeal sections of lands that councillors have sought to zone but have been told "No". This is fundamentally wrong, particularly where a developer is on site building and working with the community. This is crazy; we will never build anything. If they were seeking to build somewhere out the road or elsewhere, well and good, but as part of our greater plan we are trying to encourage people to build in towns and villages.

I am surprised, given the Minister's Green Party background and the areas in which he has been active. I have followed much of the work he has done over the years. This, however, is a no-brainer to get people into settled areas where they have sewerage, water and all the facilities. The councillors had to vote against this, of course, to vary the plan. It will now have to go to the regulator to examine it under the new Act and, possibly, onto the Minister. I do not know. I believe the regulator makes the decision and, perhaps, the Minister looks at it from there.

That is just one example, aside from getting onto one-off housing or anything to that effect. There is, therefore, a fundamental problem if reasonably large towns such as Castlepollard, Moate, Kinnegad or Delvin, which have what were naturally zoned sites in infilled sites, cannot develop in particular sites. The Minister of State will have to review this plan because we said we will build 550,000 houses by 2040.