I note the Government's plan and in the limited time I want to focus on one aspect of it, namely, the incoherence in terms of infrastructure and facilities tied in alongside. To give an example, four years ago I proposed rezoning land beside Liffey Valley Shopping Centre in an industrial area right beside the M50. It would have made perfect logical sense to build housing right opposite a major shopping centre. People could just walk across the road to it and there was space for a school as well. However the commissioner overruled it saying that it was premature and that we had enough zoned land in the county. Now, four years later, South Dublin County Council gets a diktat saying it has to identify bits of land left, right and centre, one of which is in the actual Liffey valley. This is St. Edmundsbury, where there is a proposal to put houses along a so-called transport hub that is regularly congested because of traffic rat-running to avoid the tolls on the M50. Throughout the constituency of Dublin Mid-West where there are identified tracts of land, one thing is missing. Every one of these suitable tracts of land should be proper, ring-fenced SDZs. Adamstown will have 3,000 more houses and Clonburris will have 8,000 houses but they do not have proper tie-ins of facilities and infrastructure, of having the bus services running beforehand and having trains and schools. We have DART+ South West now pushed back by five years. We cannot just build houses without building communities.

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