I move amendment No. 2: In page 10, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following: “Report on impact of amendments related to alteration of existing planning permissions 4. The Minister shall lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas every 6 months from the commencement of this Act detailing the impact of the amendments to Part 4 of the Principal Act related to alterations of existing planning permissions and detailing the location, nature and volume of such alterations by project and local authority are…

The amendment is a device to allow us to raise the substantive issue, which is whether the Department going to be tracking this. Is that the Minister of State's intention? He is bringing forward amendments to the Planning and Development Act, a Bill on which we spent considerable time and have very different views, which was meant to end the practice of the constant amending of legislation. The reason that review was initiated, as the Minister of State knows, was that the 2000 Act had been amended so many times, it…

Sure.

In 2018, Eoghan Murphy was the Minister for housing. At that point there was a very strong lobby coming from a section of the development community that apartment building was not viable and the problem was that design standards and building height restrictions introduced by our local authorities were making schemes non-viable. Eoghan Murphy introduced a series of section 28 mandatory ministerial guidelines on apartment design standards and, separately, on building heights. His justification was almost word for wor…

I could not possibly comment on the Ceann Comhairle's age.

That was a compliment to the Minister of State, by the way.

The Deputies are all very young. I do not mind saying it.

The Minister of State is just provoking me so I will allow myself to be provoked. The real issue is that if one apartment scheme is delivered but ten, 20 or 30 are delayed because they end up being litigated in the court because of these bad measures, that is not a measure of success. That is the problem here. Let us also talk about studio size. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from all of us on this side of the House. If a residential development is to be a good development, it has to meet t…

The Minister of State either does not understand the arguments we are putting forward or is wilfully ignoring them. Deputy Sheehan's point on the erosion of savings is a really important one. The Minister grossly inflated the savings. He alleged that there could be savings of €100,000 per unit. All of the industry, including Paul Mitchell from Mitchell McDermott, quickly came out publicly and said that was nonsense. The maximum saving from the design standards, according to reputable industry figures, is in the reg…

Yes.

It is not agreed.

I would like to start by thanking the officials from the planning section of the Department who facilitated a detailed briefing for members of the Oireachtas committee on Monday. I am deeply disappointed with what I consider to be the disrespectful way in which the Government has introduced and intends to proceed with this Bill. The Minister of State said "With the support of both Houses and with your co-operation, I hope to have this Bill enacted before the summer recess." We will have no say in that enactment. Th…

Last Thursday, the Oireachtas housing committee published an important report on homelessness. At the centre of that report is the call for the introduction of an emergency package of measures to prevent families and single people from becoming homeless, but also to get people out of emergency accommodation more quickly. Now that the Minister has had at least a week to consider the report, will he set out his initial response to its 14 recommendations? Will he let the House know whether it is his intention to bring…

It is simply not the case that the Minister’s Department is already undertaking the key actions recommended in this report. If that were the case, we would not have wasted our time producing the report. Month on month, the number of adults, children, single people and pensioners falling into emergency accommodation is growing. That means the core recommendation of the report that we now need an emergency response seems to be ignored by the Government. There is an explicit call to fully reinstate the funding for soc…

The report called for the Minister to extend the youth homelessness strategy out to 2030. My understanding is that despite the fact the strategy expired last year, there is no intention to extend it. Yes, the Minister is working on the child homelessness strategy but there is no sight of it. Will it be out this year? Is there a clear timeline? Can the Minister confirm that? On the housing action delivery plans, it is still not clear whether that will specify not just the number of one, two and three beds but also, …

As the Minister knows, a growing number of working people, as a result of very modest increases in their wages, are being removed from local authority social housing waiting lists when their means assessment comes under review. I know the Minister is looking at this matter and his party colleagues and backbenchers from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are raising it with him regularly. Will he give us an update on the review of social housing income limits and some indication as to whether it is his intention to act on it…

There really is an urgency to progress and conclude the work of the Department. I strongly recommend in the first instance that there is an immediate increase in the income eligibility thresholds. I am strongly of the view, and I know the Minister is considering this, that beyond an immediate increase there needs to be a more rational system of linking those thresholds to an index, whether that is net household income or some other independent index, so the thresholds track that in real time. There is a need to loo…

I again stress the urgency of this. The longer this takes the more families will lose their position on the list. I am dealing with a family in my constituency. Both are working and have had a modest increase in their income. They are currently homeless and in emergency accommodation through no fault of their own. They were recently given an offer of council accommodation but in the income reassessment, they were marginally above the threshold. We have had it reviewed, and the local authority has acted completely i…

I thank Deputy Charles Ward for bringing forward this enormously important motion, but also for inviting Sinn Féin and other Opposition parties to co-sign it, which we did with enormous enthusiasm. It is deeply disappointing that the Minister has tabled the amendment. In fact, what it says to me is that he is not listening to homeowners in the affected counties. What Deputy Ward and others have put in the motion is eminently reasonable. It is to encourage further scientific clarity to support homeowners. The gap be…

Will the Minister provide an update on when he intends to approve and release the funding for DART+ South West, which is a vital public infrastructure project for Dublin Mid-West? It is urgently needed and it is greatly delayed. Public representatives and, crucially, people living along that rail corridor were deeply disappointed when the Minister made the announcement last year that he would not honour his predecessor's commitment to approve the funding and have the project start as a matter of urgency. I would we…