Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will direct my comments to the official who wrote that speech rather than the Minister of State because the reply includes a number of quite troubling aspects.

The first aspect is that putting a limitation on somebody's right to develop property probably infringes on his or her right to private property. The reply effectively says that planning does not matter and that planning laws do not matter.

The student accommodation that has been developed is set down in the student accommodation guidelines that were issued in 2016. Included in that are very different standards of accommodation than normal accommodation. There are different standards in terms of transport, lifts, bed space, balcony space and shared space. Also, student accommodation providers got tax breaks in previous years, although not in recent years. I have no problem with saying that if standards have applied for 15 years then there should not be convergence.

The circular is not very clear and is quite watery. I can pick a couple of holes in it and I imagine that certain student accommodation providers will do so. I am very disappointed that the Government has decided not to progress it or at least amend it in such a way that would make it more workable rather than rely on a fairly weak circular.

There are certain people, particularly people in Dublin 1, 7 and 8, who have warned about this situation for a long time. I tabled this Bill last March and way before the controversy over the student accommodation crisis blew up because it was very clear to me at a really early stage that this was the game that developers were playing.

Planning should be about good sustainable planning and not support a business model and viability, which the Minister of State mentioned in his speech and reply. That is a fundamental problem with how we approach planning in Ireland. We always look at it from the developer's perspective. What developers are doing here is trying to promote a very high yield business model because even though Members are all quite well paid most of us would struggle to pay €1,200 a month for a small studio one-bed with shared facilities and one can imagine how students would struggle to pay that.

I ask that the Minister of State looks at putting this matter on a legislative framework rather than relying on the circular. I believe that the circular will be abused in the years to come because I have always thought that applications to build purpose-built student units would be abused and that has come to pass.