Darragh Nolan

So Mary Lou MacDonald has been quite a vocal critic of the bill to rent scheme and very much in line, I suppose, with her party's housing policy.

They argue that the model for housing needs to be pushed towards affordable ownership above anything else.

and that we need to reduce our reliance on the private rental market.

So in terms of a build to rent scheme, that is something that she objected to in this first proposal for the site.

And it's also something that as a politician, she has spoken out about quite a bit and that she would be quite strongly against, I think it's fair to say.

And she did express,

Concerns over the Build to Rent model when she objected to this particular development.

Some critics of Build to Rent also say that it doesn't really lend itself to helping to build up communities and welcome people into communities, that it's very much just kind of putting housing there with no kind of social spaces, no spaces for people to share and actually join in the community that they're being.

housed in.

And then in terms of the student accommodation proposal that came afterwards, it wasn't just her, but also our fellow Dublin Central TD, Mary Shercock of Labour.

So they lodged objections against that student bed scheme, arguing that it should actually be built at TUD at their Grange Gorman campus, because there's actually already planning permission there for

student accommodation to be built there and what they said as well, this site represents a rare and valuable opportunity to deliver social and affordable housing in a well-established community.

The first objection to the 117 unit apartments, the built rent, planning permission was refused for that one.

But Dublin City Council actually approved the student accommodation space to go into that former site there.

So look, it's been lying there for a number of years and I suppose at least it's being put to use now in one way.

Yeah, that is interesting in that I suppose it's one of those examples of someone who's been in the public body or in the public eye for a long time, but kind of rose to more prominence when he became a senior minister, when he became the deputy leader of Fianna Fáil, that something like this would come back up again.

So it was actually an objection to quite a big development, I think, to be fair, in his local area in Castlenock in Dublin.

So it was a mixed development that included eight apartments, and this was in his local area, in his constituency.

There were concerns expressed over the aesthetic and visual outlook of the village.

And then in 2016, Liddell sought planning permission for a development which would include one of its supermarkets, other shops, a cafe, a medical centre and those eight apartments.