Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Tipperary versus Kilkenny hurling comes to mind, when they are going full tilt at each other.

I have a couple of broad points to make. We have been quite good at regulation. It has not all worked. It came from Europe as a structure to force the Irish public administration system into use of regulators. Our former communications regulator is now the Permanent Secretary in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK. Our former energy regulator is now head of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, Ofgem, in the UK as well. The one before her went up to be the UK's water regulator. That is a sign that we had good quality regulators. They were good at what they did. They are market regulators. This is slightly different. It is more akin to the EPA, the Data Protection Commissioner or the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland in the way that the broadcasting authority has to advise the Minister on a media merger at the moment and give a published recommendation. This is a slightly different type of regulator but we should not be afraid of the use of regulation. I agree with the Minister that the regulator should not have the final say. I think it is right that the Minister has the final say. We believe in democratic political representation and the Minister being the final accountable person.

The concern I have is at the other end of the democratic issue. Whatever about the Minister having the final say, we also have to ask how we get good councillors and good regional authorities. How they interact with the regulator is just as important as how the Minister does. They are going to be involved in the day-to-day stuff. I believe the ills of our democracy are cured by more democracy. I do not think we can just shut out councillors and take away responsibility because of the corruption we have seen. We have to make sure that they are more accountable and incentivised in the right way. Our councillors were incentivised by the profit interests for developers. That meant low standards and not taking into account externalities, and ignoring the interconnection of public infrastructure. Those were the fundamental failings. We need to flip that so that they are always thinking of how to get high environmental standards, high social quality, integrated planning, good public space and so on.

The regulator has to set the rules or conditions in which that is encouraged, rather than the quick-buck, low quality, development which is desired because of corruption or because the local authority gets revenue from it and takes an attitude of "sure feck it, never mind about the quality, if there are 100 apartments and a €10,000 levy each, it will fund the council." The regulator has an important role in setting conditions where the councillors themselves must think of really high quality development. Particularly on the national planning framework, where that is evolving and moving to, it is not a top-down process that tells cities and towns how it will work but instead it asks cities and towns how they think they can work to create high quality, low-carbon, quality public space developments. The regulator has to be flexible, not only with the Minister having the final say, but providing the guidance without completely killing the initiative of local authorities to be able to come up with good quality development.

To respond to the Minister on my amendments Nos. 12, 13 and 15, the intention behind them was not that the regulator would have a second An Bord Pleanála appeals process around an individual application, as he put it, or to look at it on an individual case basis but to review the broad application of Part VIII. It is one element, which in our experience, a number of local authorities use it in a way that is not high quality development. It is not the specific case in which we are interested, but the broad performance, reporting on the overall approach to Part VIII. The way this might work would be to take best of class and highlight it as a really good local authority that is doing good, high quality development that is bringing life back into the centre of towns, not out of town centres. It would be about promoting the good as much as policing the bad. Those amendments were not designed to catch out individual development, but to review how local authorities themselves operate within the planning system which is one test of their overall philosophy or approach.