Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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64. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the amount of residential zoned land in the ownership of Galway City Council and Galway County Council and/or transferred under the land aggregation scheme by either, or both, local authorities; the location of these lands; the quantity of this land which cannot be used pending the proposed new road under the N6 project; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [24801/17]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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On 27 April 2017, I published the first phase of the Rebuilding Ireland Housing Land Map, as committed to under Action 3.5 of the Rebuilding Ireland Action Plan. This a vital initial step in the new State Housing Land Management Strategy being developed within the context of the National Planning Framework, to be titled "Ireland 2040: Our Plan".

The map is the result of a significant amount of work carried out by my Department, local authorities, the Housing Agency and other State and Semi-State bodies. The datasets published on the map include details of over 700 local authority and Housing Agency owned sites, totalling some 1,700 hectares, including location and size, as well as 30 sites (comprising around 200 hectares) owned by State or semi-State Bodies, in major urban centres, including Galway city. The map also shows the locations of 144 active private construction sites, encompassing some 5,200 new dwellings, which are under construction in the Dublin region.

The map is freely accessible on an interactive portal at /and data on sites can be extracted in a number of forms, including on a local authority basis.

With regard to lands held by the Housing Agency under the Land Aggregation Scheme, this isonly one such site in Galway, details of which are set out in the following table.

As committed to under Rebuilding Ireland , the Housing Agency is developing a Strategic Management Plan for each Land Aggregation Scheme site, in order to advance housing development from these sites at the earliest opportunity.

In addition local authorities, Approved Housing Bodies and my own Department have been advancing a suite of social housing projects, through a range of delivery mechanisms and programmes. A strong construction pipeline of over 10,000 new social houses is now in place, some of which have already been completed in 2016 and in the first quarter of this year. Progress on the status of these social housing projects, including those in Galway City and County, can be found at .

The issue of land being assigned to the N6 project is not a matter for my Department.