Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It has been an interesting discussion. I think about the Galway ring road with about €30 million spent and we have nothing. We still do not know where that project is at. To finish talking about planning, the issue is the total uncertainty around projects and when they can be delivered. When there is a national development plan and money for projects, there should be a project delivery plan. We should be looking at what projects are ready to go to ground now and get done, whether that project is a railway line, such as the western rail corridor, a road, a sewerage treatment plant or whatever. With the national development plan, we should target those projects. At the same time, a team should be preparing the next phase of projects for the coming five or ten years so they get through planning now. The Cathaoirleach talked about five-year delays. We need to start the planning process now even if a project will not be going to ground for another five years. We need a two-track approach. Right now, we have limited resources but projects that are ready to go. Let us get them going and plan others concurrently.

We have to change. I will give the small example of the Trinity Primary School in Tuam. Three schools amalgamated to form one school in 2019. We are now in 2024 and the preliminary design still has not been done. I am being told that discussion is going back and over. At the same time, three schools are operating in three different locations and we are trying to manage it as one school. It will probably be like that for another five years. That kind of stuff is eating the valuable money in the national development plan. How do we deal with this? We need a completely new approach to how we do our business. I would love for the ESRI to wipe the slate clean and ask how to do things differently with this plan in place. Forgetting about politics, the ESRI could consider how to run it as a business to get the job done. That is the first thing.

We need what I call balanced development instead of balanced regional development in this country. Our witnesses have noted, and Deputy Conway-Walsh mentioned it, that we do not have enough data to see where the money is being spent. We recognise that. The Regional Group has brought forward legislation to compel every Department to produce a report every year on where the money was spent rather than where it was announced to be spent so we can call them to task if money was not spent in a region in which it was supposed to be spent. The north and west regional area is now designated as an area in decline. It is a lagging region. That is not us or the Government saying that but the European Commission telling us we are lagging behind because we are not getting proper development. We get platitudes and sympathy.

We are told that a lot of money and schemes are being thrown at us, and that they are for these areas, but they are small schemes. I do not know the opinion of the witnesses on what our Bill is doing. It is calling every Department to account. The Department of Transport will say it spent X amount of money on new infrastructure in Offaly, Galway or in the regions or wherever. When they are doing the regions they have to include Galway as well as Cork and Limerick, by the way. That is just a threat for the witnesses. Genuinely, I believe that if we do not get that balance right and get the infrastructure out there we will end up talking about this in 20 years' time, whoever is alive to talk about it. Really and truly, it is not happening. Take the western rail corridor. It is a project that is being pushed back, brought forward, pushed back and brought forward. We all know it needs to be done. Industries want to have all of their products carbon neutral, so they want to be able to transport their finished product and raw material by rail freight, as best they can, rather than doing it by truck. In fairness, the Government is redoing the line from Limerick to Foynes to create connectivity to get things in and out. We need the western rail corridor to service the west of Ireland to do that. We need to bring it up as far as Collooney, and that will happen. It is an awful struggle to convince people that these are the things we should be doing for the betterment of Dublin and the Dublin area. We need to spread the load and the services across the country.

Right now, the biggest problem we have is housing. It is not so much the Government, which is building 30,000 per year between social and affordable - it has all of the different names on them. However, the private housing market is completely dysfunctional. I would like to hear the witnesses' thoughts on how we can help the private housing market get back to building housing schemes for people to buy. It is just not happening. I have seen cases where developers have planning permission and let it run out because they could not afford to build, and local authorities are taking over to build social housing. If we continue this role and do not take corrective action or interfere in the market to get the private sector going we will be at nothing because we will only be building social housing. How are we going to maintain our housing stock, that we are now increasing hand over fist, over the next 20 to 35 years to keep the asset right?