There were two points and I will address the first comment first. It is utterly unfair to say officials in my Department are involved in spin. They are not. It is factual to say-----

Spin Féin. Very often people refer to spin but when one is in government and answering parliamentary questions or other questions here, one cannot engage in spin. The Opposition can get away with it but the Government actually cannot. For Deputy Duffy to say officials are engaged in spin is wrong. He has been at meetings with the officials. To be clear, at EU level, a framework has been put in place under the construction products regulation to consider the impacts on the wider environment during the whole life cyc…

They understand it and know it very well. In conversations the Deputy might want to speak about something different but these people know what they are talking about. It is not fair to the reputation of those people for the Deputy to have said what he did. I wanted to correct that. We all recognise the importance of investment in public transport and overall planning. The national planning framework and the ten-year investment going with the first half of that has a 2:1 split in terms of spend on public transport v…

I am sorry for taking up time but this is important. The current study did not recommend the rail line going ahead, although I would have liked it to do so. I hope the new one will recommend a Navan rail line and then the wording can be changed in the regional plan. The wording was wrong and members knew that. They were being a little clever.

It is wrong to say the Minister was blocking this.

There were four main questions. I will give the Deputy a short answer; we can talk about it further afterwards. There is approximately €3 billion set aside to reach the retrofitting targets set out in the national development plan. The climate plan aims to retrofit a minimum of 500,000 houses with that funding. This includes social and private housing. As to whether that will be revisited, I am sure any future Government will revise that target. It certainly should add to it if it possibly can. Again, that was a te…

I have a figure for 2019. From memory, I believe it was greater than 4,000 in respect of local authority houses. I do not have the figures for the scheme overall as it is operated by a different Department. From the point of view of social housing, I believe it was greater than 4,000 but I stand to be corrected. I will get the exact figure for the Deputy; I have it somewhere in my notes. The court's biggest criticism of the scheme is that no BER was calculated before work started. It seems obvious that this should …

It is happening in very rare cases, to be honest. The majority of housing we are building now has an A2 rating and it would be hard to achieve the A2 rating with an over-reliance on fossil fuels. The majority are not relying on fossil fuels and we are certainly discouraging it for the future. The statistics show in general that 45% of housing is now using heat pumps compared to 4% a couple of years ago. There has been a major change because of our regulations. Local authority housing is being built. It is funny tha…

First, I wish to correct the answer I gave earlier about the number of social housing units. It was almost 4,500 in 2018. It was 4,453 at a cost of €13 million. In 2019, it was 3,763. The 2020 figures are much less as one would expect but hopefully they will get much better before the year is out. The figures for 2017 were 5,400. There has been a fair bit of improvement. The number of units were much higher in the early phase of the scheme back in 2014. It has got better with a greater spend and is more successful.…

That is not the way we ran it.

I will try to answer the Deputy's questions as quickly as I possibly can. On the last point, I totally agree with a pay-as-you-save scheme for the retrofits. That could be run by the State or some energy companies offer the same thing as well. A retrofit target task force has been set up across all the different Departments looking at how best we use the allocation of €3 billion over the next number of years to deal with this. Hopefully it will report quite soon, and the next Government, whoever may be in it, can m…

The one question that Deputy Boyd Barrett asked me to agree with related to the extra protections that were given during the Covid-19 emergency under the legislation brought in here in March that the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, prepared and brought through the Houses here on evictions, rent increases and so on. The current arrangement can end in June, the Minister will deal with it at Cabinet either this week or next. Under the legislation that was passed here in March, which I think the Deputy opposed, those p…

I must check the answer I gave the Deputy to that parliamentary question. I understand the people who have raised these concerns with the Deputy and I have met some of them over the years as well.

I see the clock. To be clear, every planning decision on every site must be judged individually by planners at both a local level and that of An Bord Pleanála.

I am trying to give the Deputy the answer. She took four minutes to ask the question and now she wants me to answer "Yes" or "No" in ten seconds. She is not going to get that. Planning is about interpretation of the planning laws and making decisions on a site-by-site basis. To achieve-----

The Deputy had four minutes to talk and I listened-----

It is unusual now. To be clear, I have listened to this contribution on more occasions than just today. I want to make it clear when it comes to density of sites. People very often assume-----

Each site has to be judged differently, be it in Wexford, Carlow, Cork, Meath or Dublin, and I am conscious that the guidelines that are set-----

I am going to be clear on this. The guidelines that are set often lead people to be concerned about sites. I want to be clear that high density does not mean high-rise, and that is what people keep saying. I am not saying there has to be a high-rise in every set.

It is very clear-----