Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08
============================================================

Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City

If the Minister of State will allow me to make my point, the average rent of a studio apartment in Dublin is €1,850. With these revised apartment guidelines, the Minister of State has allowed developers to build entire developments of tiny studio or one-bedroom apartments. When you go to someplace like Vienna, there is an appropriate mix of one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments. In addition, there are community facilities and amenities, which the Minister of State has also removed during the past year. He has removed them from the LDA. There was a big row with Dublin City Council about removing community space from apartment developments. When you leave your apartment in Vienna, you can board a world-class public transport system. We have a situation in this country where we have so-called transport-orientated development with no bloody public transport. People are going at it hammer and tongs over car spaces in suburban parts of Dublin because they never got their train or DART services. They have been delayed and delayed again. The Minister of State cannot compare the two.
Even the LDA, which comes under the auspices of the Minister of State's Department by extension, said the savings would be marginal in most units - it said they would be nowhere near what the Minister trumpeted them to be last year - and that is what they turned out subsequently to be. This is the core point. We are essentially paying way over the top. In many cases, the taxpayer and the approved housing bodies are paying out an absolute fortune for tiny shoebox apartments. The entire model is fundamentally broken.

---

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/2026-07-08/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-08