Departmental Schemes Dail Éireann — 2024-05-09 ============================================================ Alan Farrell (FG), Dublin Fingal I completely agree with what the Minister said. As she well knows, vibrant communities have people living in the middle of them. Especially in northern Fingal, the success of the national broadband project has meant that more and more people have the capacity to work from home, particularly in a post-Covid environment. Any public representative knows there are just as many people at home in the middle of the afternoon as in the evenings when we would have traditionally canvassed. That is because of the roll-out of broadband and the increasing number of people moving to our rural communities. A key and important aspect of the success of a community is turning vacancy into homes and other community facilities, whether retail or other. I commend the Minister and her Department on the work being done. As the Minister said, there are certain properties when you drive or walk by them you ask why they are still vacant, because these grants have been around for a while. I commend the Minister's Department and the Department of housing on the work it does with local authorities. I am just looking for more. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-05-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:56+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-05-09