I have amendments to move here as well. I will be very clear about this. To have three hours for 175 pages of amendments is absolutely no way to do legislation. These are new amendments that have not been discussed in this Chamber before, have not been scrutinised here, so this is our only attempt to scrutinise them. Most of them will not be reached at all today. That is very worrying, given the track record in respect of planning legislation, where we have repeatedly had mistakes made that the Department and the M…

It is the amendments.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCeann Comhairle. I will be relatively brief, but I need to respond to what the Minister has said. I congratulate him on answering a question we did not ask. We did not say the legislation was rushed. A number of us specifically said that putting 175 pages of amendments into three hours was rushed. That is what we said. I want to back up what has been said about the overall process. When we did pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill, not only were the vast bulk of our recommendations not tak…

There were seven Ministers going in and out.

The process worked best when the Minister was present because some of the other Ministers were, unfortunately, from outside the Department and were sometimes not able to engage and answer on a lot of the issues. When I asked about Aarhus compliance on Committee Stage, the Minister said that some matters in the report did not relate to the Bill. I asked about the matters in the Aarhus compliance report published four months ago that do relate to the Bill. I specifically asked about the section of the report which st…

I asked the Minister earlier on to answer the question.

That is great because we have been asking for an answer to that question for months, and not just on the generalities. Regarding the planning delays to which the Minister referred, let us be very clear about this. We are all opposed to planning delays in the system. Unfortunately, the biggest delays that have occurred in our planning system in recent years, with the backlogs in An Bord Pleanála, were a direct result of the Minister’s decision not to appoint members to the board of An Bord Pleanála. That created a v…

I move amendment No. 8 to Seanad amendment No. 2: To delete subsections (3) and (4) and substitute the following: “(3) No part of this Part of this Act shall be commenced until a resolution by both Houses of the Oireachtas is passed in respect of any section, Chapter or Part that the Minister proposes to commence, following a debate in both Houses of at least four hours. (4) A debate required by subsection (3) shall allow for either House to make amendments to any order of commencement proposed by the Minister.”.

To be very clear, Deputy Boyd Barrett said very specifically that the points being raised on transport and active travel were important, and he acknowledged that.

The Minister should listen to the points made. There are four points I want to make on the amendments. The first concerns compliance with the Aarhus Convention. I do not accept the response the Minister gave earlier on this. It is exceptionally clear that extensions to the duration of permission are subject to Article 6 of the convention and will always require participation and, therefore, the Minister was wrong in the answer he gave me. The new definition of "material alteration" does not cover this. That is exce…

Instead of investing in long-term sustainable supports in the budget, the Government splashed cash on temporary measures. Today we learned the dates that those ten payments will be made. Most of them will be made before 22 November and the remainder will be made by early December. The Government parties are cock-a-hoop with that schedule because it is right around when most of us expect to be going to the polls. Their glee will be short-lived because bribery is a bad look. Has there ever been a more blatant attempt…

I want the Taoiseach to put in place long-term supports and changes, not temporary measures. Let us be very clear about that. The Government's failure to invest where it is needed most has real consequences for people. I will give the Taoiseach just one example. Gaelcholáiste Reachrann is on the northside of Dublin in my constituency. It is a great school with very dedicated staff. However, while new school buildings have been promised for more than 20 years, the students are still being taught in prefabs. Some of …

I agree with the previous two speakers regarding the overall delivery of affordable cost-rental housing. It is way off what is needed. There is no question about that, and it is especially the case given we have multi-billion euro surpluses available that could, of course, be put into affordable housing. The Bill is no way to do legislation. I accept that parts of it are urgent, such as those relating to AHB registration, with which I have no issue, but other parts are not urgent and should have been done in the pr…

Never before has the opportunity or the need for action from Government to address the housing crisis been so great and never before has the opportunity for Government to address the housing crisis been so great. The Housing Commission in its report published in May stated very clearly that we need 60,000 new homes a year to be delivered. Currently only about half of that is being delivered. This budget presented the Government with a great and golden opportunity to take radical and decisive action to ensure we get…

I had tabled two amendments to this resolution to increase the stamp duty to 100% and I understand they have been ruled out of order. This increase of 5% being put forward by the Government is pathetic. It shows it is clearly not serious whatsoever about stamping out the practice of multibillion euro funds coming in and snapping up homes, pushing up prices, and pushing out first-time buyers. We saw this happening earlier this year in Belcamp Manor in my constituency where 85% of the newly built homes were snapped u…

I want to ask the Minister about childcare and core funding. Parents with children in the Little Rainbows crèche in my constituency were told by the operator this summer that the operator was withdrawing from core funding and increasing its fees. The increased fees are simply not sustainable or affordable for many of the parents, forcing some of them to choose whether they can continue to afford to work. As the Minister knows, this is not an isolated case; this has been unfolding in similar situations across the co…

With regard to homelessness, there is a significant problem with vacant social homes being left empty for more that a year by some local authorities. The NOAC report that was just published shows that in the Galway City Council area it takes an average of 50 weeks to re-let an empty social home. In Limerick social homes are being left empty for more than a year. It is 62 weeks before they are being re-let. This is a real slap in the face for the more than 14,000 people living in homeless emergency accommodation. Wh…

If it is on average a year with local authorities, it is all their stock.

In 2019, when the number of people living in homeless emergency accommodation exceeded 10,000 for the first time, the Minister denounced the Fine Gael Government for shattering yet another record. He went on to say this could not continue and promised Fianna Fáil would fix the housing crisis. He is now coming towards the end of his term as Minister for housing and there are now 14,429 people living in emergency homeless accommodation. Shamefully, this includes 4,401 children who are growing up without a home. That …

We did not have Priority Questions.