I very much welcome the Government's proposed new housing plan that is at Cabinet today and will be launched tomorrow. I welcome the increased targets that form part of this plan. I note the Taoiseach said on his way to Cabinet this morning that it will be more ambitious than any other housing plan and that it will deliver. I sincerely hope it does. I call on the Leader to organise a debate on the new housing plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, in the next couple of weeks so we can get into the teeth of it. Every one of us in this House is frustrated at the slow pace of development in general in this country but certainly when it comes to the building of houses.

It is terrible to think that there is planning permission granted for thousands of houses that cannot be built because of the punitive increase in construction inflation and various other challenges. Also, there are villages like Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, for example, where there is land available but the current guidelines only allow for so many new houses whereas the infrastructure is in place in terms of treatment facilities and so on to accommodate a huge amount of development. We could build dozens of houses there because the sewerage system is up to standard. It was built about 15 or 20 years ago. There needs to be a whole-of-government response to this and I sincerely hope that is what we will see.

Certainly, when it comes to the easing of zoning of land we need to see a lot more land being zoned residential. We need to just remove the red tape, remove the bureaucracy and create an environment where developers are not sending skilled construction workers abroad to work on projects because of the difficulties here. We need to see people want to work here and people coming from other countries to work here in order to achieve the target of 600,000 in six years. It is something I very much welcome and we in this House have a role to play in scrutinising the proposed plan.