The Minister is absolutely correct. There are planning permissions for 40,000 apartments that have not yet been commenced. The Minister claimed that this measure is to activate those permissions. Why then provide a VAT reduction in respect of apartments under construction? All the expenditure being provided for this measure next year is for apartments that are currently being built. It takes approximately two years to build out an apartment development. That means €250 million of this money for next year will go on…

What does this Government have against children? Despite the enormous resources at its disposal, thousands upon thousands of children are being left behind every year. When Fine Gael took office in 2011, there were just over 600 children officially classified as homeless. Now, it is a staggering 5,000 and continuing to rise. This means that, in the 14 years that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in one shape or another have been in charge of housing policy, tens of thousands of children have been forced into homelessness. …

It is not true.

It is not true.

He does not even have his facts straight.

Evan and Nadia Kavanagh and their three children are renters in Clondalkin. They are now at imminent risk of homelessness due to overholding on their notice of termination since 6 September. The landlord wants to sell to the local authority and applied through the tenant in situ scheme. The application was being processed and the landlord was then informed in July that because the funding had been exhausted, the purchase could not continue. The family do not have enough time on the list to be eligible for a council…

Not for the tenant in situ scheme.

No additional funding has been provided for tenant in situ purchases.

It is just not correct, Taoiseach.

In the 11 years I have been an elected representative in Dublin Mid-West, every single year as the school term approaches, my office receives calls from desperate parents who do not believe their child will have a school place come September. This year has been no different. The parents do not come to us at the start of that battle, but near the end. They have spent months or, in some cases, years battling for those places. The key problems remain the same today as when I started in this job. We simply do not have …

I thank the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach and the Minister. The Minister has now been in office for over six months and in my opinion, he has made some spectacularly bad policy decisions. The first, of course, was slashing funding for vital homeless prevention schemes like the tenant in situ scheme, Housing First and CAS acquisitions. The second was emasculating a very good suggestion from the Housing Commission to set up a housing activation delivery office with emergency powers legislation. The third was the Minister's…

The Minister is going to go down in history for having introduced a new principle of economics. It is called shrinkflation. It is the idea you can reduce the price of something by reducing the size of something. We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. The price of milk has gone up almost 14% in the last year. Imagine a milk producer said people should not worry because producers are going to cut the price of milk by 50% and do it by cutting the size of a pint in half. People would laugh at any proposer of …

I move amendment No. 1 to Seanad amendment No. 24: After subsection (1), to insert the following: "(1A) The holder of a permission shall notify the public of the application by way of a site notice. (1B) In order to ensure adherence with the State’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention and the principles of good planning and development the relevant authority shall provide for public participation in the certification process by way of inviting written submissions on the application from interested persons or or…

Can I briefly comment?

I apologise to the Minister. I meant to say this on section 2. At some point during the Minister's responses to any of the clusters of amendments or the sections, it would be only right if he was able to give us any additional detail he has about the amendments he is intending to submit in the Seanad, that is, both the additional transitional amendments as well as the so-called permitted alterations. The first reason is just to give us some information - we got some from a Minister of State yesterday - but he might…

I move amendment No. 5: In page 11, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following: “(e) The Minister may, by way of regulations, provide for third party observations for consideration by the planning authority to ensure compliance with the State’s obligations under the Aarhus Convention and the principles of good planning and development.”. I want to make a couple of general points on the planned legislation and I will then speak to each of the amendments. There will be many occasions where we are arguing from c…

That is precisely the problem. If this change to planning legislation had been included in the Planning and Development Act 2024 which we spent two years passing through the House, as a committee we could have asked, for example, planning law experts, professional planners and legal experts who specialise in Aarhus Convention compliance their views on this. One of the points I made on Second Stage was that it is hard to understand why this provision was not proposed in the legislation from last year, given that fut…

I move amendment No. 6: In page 11, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following: “(e) The Minister may, in consultation with the Minister for Justice and with the approval of Cabinet, introduce regulations to place High Court good practice guidelines on a statutory footing in order to have legally binding statutory timelines for the hearing of Judicial Reviews and for the issuing of Court decisions on Judicial Review related to planning matters governed by the Principal Act.”. Obviously, the principal challeng…

I accept the technical explanation but would just make one point. I ask the Minister to examine the principle behind this amendment and to discuss it with the Minister for justice and also, in the course of his work as Minister for housing, with the relevant members of the Judiciary. We need to fix this bit of the system too. There is little value in having statutory timelines for decisions of the board, for example, if things then get judicially reviewed and are stuck in the courts for two or three years. I know t…

I will speak to my two amendments in this grouping. I said at the outset that we are not opposed in principle to a time-limited extension of duration. The challenge, however, is that there is no point giving somebody an extension of duration if they cannot demonstrate that something has changed and that what was previously unviable is now viable. I therefore think there needs to be some mechanism by which, when a public or private sector developer applies for the extension of duration, there is a requirement on the…