Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to follow on with the subject of housing and, in particular, the issue of affordable housing for first-time buyers in this country. A number of things could help with the delivery of affordable houses. The Tánaiste spoke about wastewater treatment plants. In many villages and towns in my constituency and throughout the country, people cannot build houses because there are not wastewater treatment plants. When I became a councillor in 2004, it was on the back of a plan to build a wastewater treatment plant in Corofin, a place the Tánaiste will know well from football. Now, in 2024, that is not on anybody's agenda. In 2007, An Bord Pleanála stated that we could not build any houses in Corofin because it would be premature to do so in the absence of a municipal treatment plan. That type of thing is replicated all over the country.

The affordable housing scheme that is place is not working in many of our towns. In Tuam, the largest county town in Galway, we cannot get an affordable scheme to work as a result of the matrix that is in place. the contribution towards development density and all that type of thing. In Galway, the second biggest county in Ireland, there is only one affordable scheme. That scheme is due to be launched later today. We are falling far behind the curve.

The other thing that is giving rise to costs and making housing unviable is in our zoning and planning policies - not our Planning Acts - is that we have what is called core planning. Basically, this stipulates that we cannot zone as much land as we would like. We are confined to zoning a certain amount of land under what is referred to as R1 zoning. When that land is used up, we go to R2 land. As the Tánaiste said, however, some of the land that has been zoned is owned by farmers who are working it. This land will never be available. There are other lands that cannot be made available for legal reasons, tax reasons or whatever. We are zoning land and preparing local area plans without looking to see if the land is available at all. That is creating a scarce commodity, namely land that is zoned. This, in turn, is adding to the cost of building houses. These are not things that would cost money. They are things that can be done with a change in policy. I ask the Tánaiste to consider all of this for the future of our country.

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