John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I raise the concept of county development plans and how I feel the Planning Regulator and the views he passes down to council executives and councils are divergent from the Government's ambitious housing targets and the number of houses we want to build each year. They are not going hand in hand or helping each other. I will give two examples, one relating to urban centres and the other to rural areas. Not to be parochial about it, but I can only speak of what I know well, which is my home town of Dundalk. We have the Planning Regulator coming down to the local authority to dezone land that is strategic 1 land. It is land that is ready to be built on in the middle of an urban centre. It is shovel-ready and can be built on straight away. It is dezoned to strategic 2, which will not be built for five to ten years. How do we correlate that with our desire to build so many homes each year over the period of this Government?

I know the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, is doing a lot of this but it would be important for us as a House to have a debate about the Planning Regulator, county development plans and how we have two sectors working in tandem. There is no point dezoning land we can build a load of houses on and, in two or three years, wondering why we cannot build houses. It is because we are dezoning it now at the behest of the Planning Regulator. As a result, there are many local councillors and local authorities saying "No" to the executives and the Planning Regulator. They have to get independent legal advice and pay for it themselves to put a good case against it. I do not think that is fair.

It is the same in terms of rural one-off housing. I have just come from a meeting with the IFA which brought up that the restrictions we are putting on such housing means we do not want anyone to live in rural Ireland anymore and we want people to move from rural areas to urban centres. You would not expect some from an urban centre to move to a rural area they are not from, so I do not think it is fair. I would appreciate a debate about that.