I welcome any changes to amend planning legislation. Something I would like the Minister to look at in the new year is listed buildings and building over listed buildings. In Limerick, we have a lot of listed buildings and many buildings which are stopping young people from living over them. I have no problem with the fire regulations but the problem is that conservation rules mean the inside of these buildings cannot be altered to allow people to live over them, as was done for decades and centuries. We want to get people back into those living areas. We also need to look at the issue of buildings within the curtilage of a listed building. A property could be 30 m or 40 m away from a listed building but because it is within the curtilage, they say work must be sensitive to that. We need to make this work for people in the 21st century. People lived in these buildings from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s and all the way up along the line and there was no such thing as curtilage. Now the front facade and the front roof structure must be protected. If there are buildings that can be brought back into use for young people or anybody who wants to live in them, we must allow them to modernise the inside. I am talking about houses, not iconic buildings. I know of a case where a young couple was allowed to extend onto the back of their house but the front part was listed. This was a street house. They were made keep the timber. They said they could take down the timber, slab it and put the timber back up again. The costs would be massive. If we keep the front facade, the sash windows and the roofscape, we could make it look like the old street, but we should allow people to modernise the inside of houses. I am not talking about iconic buildings. They must be protected. I am talking about buildings on the streets that people can live in. We must streamline the system. I have one building at the moment that is in the curtilage of a listed building, which is in the care of the OPW. Planning permission was granted to renovate the house, which we have done. Planning permission was also granted to extend the property, but we are still waiting to do that because when the planning permission was given, they never saw that there was a building at the back of it. The building looks lovely architecturally but it is actually dangerous and it will fall into a neighbour's property. They now say they want to have this assessed. The cost of the assessment and the necessary works is €1 million and they do not have a penny to throw at it. I want to make the building safe and they are saying "No". I need the Minister's help in the new year to make sure we can get people back into towns and villages and into buildings that we can modernise while respecting the streetscape and iconic buildings. We must get people back into the upstairs of listed buildings.

Sentiment score: 0.11