Departmental Reports
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
============================================================

Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The mission statement for the Department of the Taoiseach in its report says it is about ensuring a sustainable economy and a successful society. Neither of those things is possible unless we address the lack of social and affordable housing and the housing crisis that is faced in this country. Recently, in my area, an area called Old Connaught, on the border of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and Wicklow, there was a local area plan discussion about building social and affordable housing. Our councillors, Melisa Halpin and Dave O'Keeffe, proposed that we should have a condition that all the housing, much of it on public land, should be social and affordable, because we do not need more unaffordable housing. The Government's councillors laughed and scoffed at that, then proposed and voted through plans to cut the developer levies, in other words to give a handout to the developers. How is that compatible with the aspirations of the Department of the Taoiseach?

---

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/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20