I will raise a broad range of issues affecting rural Ireland. I will start with one close to my heart, that of rural planning. This is an important component of dealing with the housing challenge. I have worked through four county development plans in Wicklow and made many changes to help with rural planning. There are currently many aspects of it that make it difficult and we must make changes. First, social and economic need must trump views and prospects in planning decisions. Second, we need to allow people to downsize from one rural area to another. This is especially important for elderly people who live in unsuitable accommodation. Third, we need to identify hamlets to allow clustering of houses in rural areas and broaden the qualification for building in hamlets to include nearby villages and towns. Fourth, housing need criteria should not be applied if people own a house in an urban area and want to move back to their rural area. I could make a range of other points, but I do not have time this evening to go through all of them. On housing in villages, we need investment in villages, including in water and wastewater schemes. This would reduce the pressure on rural planning and help to make villages vibrant. The residential zoned land tax, RZLT, is suitable for cities but is not appropriate in rural Ireland and should be abolished outside the main cities. It mitigates against housing development in rural areas because sometimes it is economically viable, but a lot of the time it is not economically viable to build because build costs often exceed the selling price. Therefore, land should be left zoned until it becomes economically viable rather than be dezoned. Airbnb is another important issue in rural Ireland. It should be encouraged in rural areas and villages and no development levy should be applied where a unit is being changed to an Airbnb. Current operators should be exempt from planning. They bring tourists to parts of Ireland that would otherwise never have tourists. I live in a small village in west Wicklow where a number of Airbnbs operate. They bring tourists to that village. Otherwise, it would never see tourists. These properties are not a solution to the housing challenge, which will, please God, dissipate in the next few years. We should not sacrifice the wonderful service Airbnb is to tourism and the funding of small operators in rural Ireland on the altar of an over-reaction, thinking it will lead to long-term lets. More than 90% of them, according to various surveys, will not lead to long-term lets, so they are not a significant solution to the housing crisis. They should be left to operate. The RRDF is a great fund and I have seen it work well, but I have also seen it not work so well. It needs to come with funding for a dedicated person to oversee it in the councils. In my experience, no one in the council takes responsibility and nothing gets done. Money is not being spent and it loses value over years because of inflation. It is incredibly frustrating. I have seen it in a town in west Wicklow where the money was allocated in 2019 and there still is no shovel in the ground. Consultancy fees have been clocked up but nothing has changed. LEADER funding has helped many rural projects from employment to playgrounds and is a really successful operation. I will focus on the reliability of public transport. We need more of it, but we first need to get the reliability right. For example, the 132 bus from west Wicklow to Dublin is not reliable. People will not use an unreliable service. There is an extraordinarily poor service on the Wicklow to Rosslare line. There have been no improvements in 40 years in the train down the east coast to Rosslare. This train is the Cinderella of train services in Ireland. Wicklow town and towns further south have all increased hugely in population in that time. On school transport, some secondary schools' feeder primary schools are a longer distance away from them than other primary schools. This means that when children are in a feeder school that is further away than another school, they are not allowed tickets and have to rely on concessionary tickets. That anomaly needs to be resolved. Turning to tourism, in February last year, I proposed the development of an American Presidents trail to develop the sites that the ancestors of 23 American Presidents hailed from. I am pleased to say it has been approved by the Cabinet. Such projects increase tourism in many parts of the island and they need to be developed all over rural island, especially using the shared island fund. With the cost of business in rural areas,-----
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------it is important that non-agricultural contractors are recognised-----
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-----in the Government's response to the fuel challenge.
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