I welcome the Minister. The joint committee carried out extensive pre-legislative scrutiny on the Bill and produced a report, which it submitted to the Department. It got a response back on the recommendations, some of which were accepted, some of which were partially accepted and some of which were not accepted at all. The committee is willing to proceed to Committee Stage if time is available for it. The members will be willing to work with the Minister on it. I am not going to carry out an autopsy of SHDs; this …

Yes, but Deputy Dillon is getting three minutes.

We are sharing eight minutes and Deputy Dillon is getting three minutes.

I thank Deputy Farrell for sharing time with me. This climate plan is hugely ambitious and it needs to be. It is a real challenge for every Deputy, every person living in Ireland and everybody who lives on the planet. Climate action is a massive challenge. It is such a big challenge for us in this Chamber because we have done very little about it for 20 years. People have spoken about it and people have been outraged about it but Members have done very little over the past 20 years to address climate change. That i…

The average age in this House is 50. I checked that earlier today. Most of us will not be around when the real horrors of climate change hit this country, when farmers are having difficulty farming on flooded lands, when sea levels rise in our coastal communities and when parts of the planet will be hugely challenged by mass migration as parts of the planet will not be habitable. We will not be around for that. It is difficult for a politician to take a decision beyond that five or ten year term of their political …

In the week of COP26, when the nations of the world have come together to address the climate emergency, we should not forget the other emergency, the biodiversity emergency. I would like to ask the Minister about the role of biodiversity officers in local authorities and his view on having a biodiversity officer for every local authority across the country.

That is positive news. Like the Minister, I know the really good work that is done at local authority level. For example, the heritage officer of Wicklow County Council does a significant amount of work in this area. However, the roll-out of biodiversity officers to all local authorities would assist heritage officers, planning services and local and district engineers as they attempt to tackle some of the causes of biodiversity loss. We know the main factors are habitat fragmentation, loss of habitats, pesticides,…

I thank the Minister. I hope to see Wicklow County Council added to the list of local authorities with a dedicated biodiversity officer. I have spoken to the chief executive of the council on this issue and will be speaking to him later today to encourage him to engage on that role and apply to the €600,000 fund. I note the positive work being done by the Department in terms of the resourcing of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the funding allocation that has brought it back up to its previous levels. I …

I thank the Minister of State for bringing the Bill to the House. Many aspects of it are long overdue and need to be addressed, especially given we have to address spiralling transport emissions and the planning of the past 40 or 50 years that has led to car dependency and urban sprawl. We urgently need to get people onto public transport, but it is difficult to provide high-frequency public transport when settlement is so dispersed. The NTA recently appeared before the Joint Committee on Transport and Communicatio…

This is probably a question that comes up this time every year. Will the Minister make a statement on discussions or actions with the Garda Commissioner and An Garda Síochána on a safe Hallowe'en? I am particularly concerned about the prevalence of fireworks, the nature, scale and size of bonfires and the materials being put on them.

I thank the Minister. I am reassured to know there is such action on fireworks. I was at Crumlin children's hospital late one night and the amount of fireworks going off was an absolute disgrace. I do not know what kind of an idiot sets off fireworks near a children's hospital that late at night. We really do need to take action on their prevalence. They seem to be going off for weeks and weeks in advance. Some people even set them off during the day. I do not know what is in somebody's head that they want to light…

I was going to suggest that as something to do. Hallowe'en is a great event for children. People enjoy it and it is fine. We want to have safety and responsibility. I am concerned for people around a bonfire where we do not even know what has been thrown onto it and what could result from something being burned on it and the fumes coming off it. There is nobody to marshal it or monitor what is going on. Perhaps something we could look at with local authorities, fire services and the Garda is having one centralised …

The programme for Government commits to a Cabinet committee on economic recovery and investment to prioritise insurance reform. The survival of an outdoor business in Bray is threatened by high insurance costs as are many community groups, sporting groups and businesses. I look forward to meeting the Minister of State, Deputy Fleming, later to discuss what we can do for Squirrel's Scramble in Bray and the others affected. We need to reduce the cost of insurance, the number of cases and the number of awards made. I …

I thank the Minister, his advisers and the departmental officials for producing this Housing for All strategy. I acknowledge the collaborative approach we had in preparing this document. It is a long-term plan, incorporating many green objectives that started off as discussions with the Minister and his advisers. We improved those ideas and now we see them in a strategy and in legislation. Cost rental has been the core of the Green Party housing policy for a long time. We met our Green colleagues in Vienna to look …

They are really good at heckling, but even their heckling does not stand up to scrutiny. They do not need to deal in detail and facts. They deal in sound bites, populism-----

-----headlines and criticism. None of that has ever produced a house. None of them has ever produced a house. The target we need to produce is large but doable. It also creates another problem in that it leads to significant carbon emissions if these are all to be new builds, which I do not believe they will be. Concrete production is an enormous carbon emitter. If we take the existing stock of derelict and vacant buildings, and stock that is going into obsolescence, and provide the resources for people to refurbis…

I want to ask the Minister of State about the current level of resources and staffing at local authority level in planning services, especially in light of the extra pressures that will be put on them by the planning and development (amendment) (LSRD) Bill, the Maritime Area Planning Bill and the new draft development plan guidelines, which call for extra monitoring and measuring on development plans. This is a good thing but I simply want to ensure we have good staff resources to carry out all those extra duties.

I put the question in the context of the huge amount of work that is done at local authority level, of which the Minister of State will be aware. Our planning services are very professional and offer very professional services to everybody who engages with them, whether that is through the development plan process or other areas. Development plans are getting more and more complex and we need to incorporate a lot of environmental law and climate law. It has become a much more complex process. The consent process is…

It is reassuring to hear that the e-planning system is progressing so well. That will bring many efficiencies to the entire planning system and cut down on those masses of paperwork that are involved in a planning application. That is, therefore, a positive move. I agree with the Minister of State about the range of services that are required now in planning. I talk about things like county architects and biodiversity officers. We see in active travel how that will also tie into our town centre first policies. The …

The programme for Government commits to a referendum on the right to housing. Such a right - coupled with the Housing for All strategy which was the whole-of-government approach which is costed and funded, and deliverable and realistic - to be enshrined in the Constitution would be the part that is missing in the Government's overall housing strategy. Can the Minister provide the House with an update on that programme for Government commitment on a constitutional right to housing?