Housing Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-16
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Brian Stanley (IND), Laois

To summarise it, the key issue is fairly straightforward. If you take any county outside the Pale, very few houses would not have some structure there already, such as a garage, greenhouse, store or whatever. That is the problem. It is going to be a shed or it will be the cabin or modular development. I know they do not have to be modular and can be a different type of self-contained structure. They will work in certain cases and I welcome that, but they are not moving at the moment. There is no one moving on them because of these problems. The big message I want the Minister of State to take back to the senior Minister and to the senior officials in the Department, because this has not been thought through properly, is that by bundling existing sheds and greenhouses in class 3 structures in with the new class 3A, you are taking up so much of the 45 sq. m that you cannot have the cabin. That is the problem. You cannot have the backyard dwelling. That is one thing that needs to be sorted out.
The second thing that needs to be sorted out is the size of the site. The Minister of State gets it. He is from a rural area, so he understands what 1.4 acres is. It is massive. It is a small field. However, despite the fact that the existing dwelling on the site has been there a long time and is serviced by town water and town sewerage, people cannot move on it. They cannot put the small modular or backyard cabin on this site for the elderly relative because there is an existing fuel shed of 15 sq. m. The 15 sq. m leaves them with 30 sq. m., but the minimum they can be is 32 sq. m, so it is game over for them. That needs to be taken into account. The way the measure is constructed at the moment is not practical.
The Minister of State is saying that these dwellings will require certification and be subject to building regulations, but who is going to inspect them? All people have to do is notify the local authority 14 or 15 days before they are going to put it in there and that is it. That is a problem.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-16