Ceisteanna ó na Comhaltaí Eile - Other Members’ Questions Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ Danny Healy-Rae (IND), Kerry I am glad to get this opportunity. I am delighted that the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, is taking the questions today. As he knows himself, we have not always agreed about everything, but he takes the question and he comes back and gives an answer. I hope that, on top of all the other times I have asked these same questions, something will happen now. We have a clause in Kerry known as the rural areas under significant urban influence, which I understand was to prevent applicants coming out from towns or other urban settings but is now actually preventing local people - local to their site - who apply for planning permission from getting it. Many times, I have asked here about the restriction preventing family members from building on sites exiting onto national primary and secondary roads, even where there is already an existing exit-entrance serving many other users. The problem is that if this were just an ordinary local road, there would be no problem, but the very same type of road that was never taken in charge by the local authority is being deprived of getting planning in much the same scenarios. This change was signed into law in 2012 by Leo Varadkar, a former leader in this House, and the Minister with responsibility for this, who later agreed with me in this Chamber that a total ban was very wrong. I am asking that this be given back to the local engineers to decide if the exit is safe and if the site distance is of the right standard. There is a lot of talk about affordable home schemes. We never had any one of those schemes in Kerry. I cannot understand why. I cannot understand how you can call one house an affordable house when the house beside it costs the standard price, is the same size and costs the same to build. Surely to be able to call a house affordable, the materials, the labour or the planning should cost less. I remind the Members opposite that 40% of the cost of building any house today is VAT, other taxes, planning and levies. Could the Government reduce the VAT? There is no VAT on building materials in the UK. I do not think the people are being told the truth about these affordable schemes. We have heard the Taoiseach many times say that we need to zone more land for housing. However, on many occasions when elected members in Kerry and management agreed to zone more, the regulator stepped in and blocked them, even though these lands were serviced. What will happen now where the builders could use the Government's new proposal to build treatment plants on non-serviced lands----- --- 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/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11