Malcolm Noonan (Green Party)

I thank the Minister of State. I thank all the Senators for their contributions. I will address a couple of points raised by the Minister of State in his closing contribution. From our perspective, we are disappointed that a timed amendment has been placed on this legislation. As others said, this an opportunity to bring this Bill to Committee Stage and some of the deficiencies, as the Minister of State put it, could be addressed on that Stage. We have long debated this matter and Senator Higgins has already related the previous Bills brought forward to try to address it. Regarding the Planning and Development Act 2024, I was centrally involved in bringing that legislation through the Houses. It still does not address this aspect, where there was an opportunity there to do it. What this Bill does is to gift the Government an opportunity to try to bring 10,000 houses back into productive use in our town centres. This would really be of exceptional value.

Turning to the specific query about circumventing the requirement to meet building control standards, this is certainly not the case, as we see it, in this Bill. It does place the onus on architects to submit proposals to the planning authority and the planning authority signs off. If anything, therefore, it strengthens compliance in our view. Issues were also raised around the town centre first process and town centre first planner. Staff are already in place in this regard between the vacancy officers and the town centre first officers. Certainly, when we brought the town centre first policy to the Government in 2020, it was introduced to look at the broader framework of having a one-stop shop. Unfortunately, that element did not make it over the line in 2020, so we are proposing it again. We spoke to conservation architects and they were very clear they have been looking for this approach for more than a decade. It is contained in the report from Martin Colreavy in 2012.

I think, therefore, we are missing an opportunity to move this Bill forward. I welcome the comments from the Minister of State, but I think we are missing an opportunity here to move this Bill forward, not to put a timed amendment on it, to allow it to progress, to take on board the good measures and elements in here, to bring it through and, hopefully, to have it enacted by the end of the year. I welcome that the Minister of State is going to take elements of the legislation and bring them in through the technical working group. I ask as well that the working group would specifically look at all elements of this legislation and see where we can align them. We need to bring in the professions and bring in conservation architects. We did quite a bit of work in the last Government in ensuring every local authority will have an architectural conservation officer in the context of the town centre first teams. This initiative really needs to move up in scale and out of these exemplar projects we have had through the various heritage grants. It needs to be moved to a scale where it will actually deliver results, deliver housing for people and bring vibrancy back into our town centres. We need to have a whole new approach and stop turning our backs on our Irish towns. They are beautiful and unique and something very special. We go off to European towns, look at them and think they are fabulous. We have something unique and special here. We have been knocking them, demolishing them and ignoring them for far too long and this Bill is trying to address some of that history.

I heard with interest the senior Minister on "Prime Time" yesterday saying that the Government was going to move mountains and do everything in its power and that it has written to the CEOs of local authorities to do the same thing, namely, to find every single enabling force to try to bring housing into use. We have presented a Bill here that will do just that. It is estimated that this would bring about 10,000 houses back into use. As I said in opening, it is not just the houses that face onto streets. It is the burgage plots and backfilled sites. They are in all our towns around the country and could be filled in with ten, 20 or 30 units for families to live in. It should be done at scale. While I appreciate the Government's response to this, I am extremely disappointed that the Minister has opted to instruct the Government to put a timed amendment on the Bill. I have been present in the past when timed amendments were put on Bills and sometimes I was not very happy about doing it because it was good legislation. We constantly hear the Taoiseach and Ministers say that all that needs to be done is to put down all the proposals we bring forward. We are bringing something positive forward this evening and it is disappointing that it is being met with a brick wall. I hope the measures we have proposed will be given consideration. I do not care whether it is our Bill that is introduced, but the measures in it are bloody good, especially the measure around the town centres first policy. The one-stop shop could be a real enabler, activate a huge volume of housing and bring our town centres back to life.