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

I move amendment No. 16:

In page 10, between lines 21 and 22, to insert the following:“(b) the national transition objective established in the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015,”.

I will speak to my amendment No. 16 and I intend to press it. To a certain extent, what this amendment proposes involves a continuation of the previous debate on the overarching objectives, rules or boundaries within which we give councils freedom to come back. All of these are key environmental objectives. We are more specific in various sections in setting out the functions and the requirements in terms of policies and objectives that need to take place. It is important that we come in on the planning side.

We have to take account of a very standard issue direction, which we see in much legislation. We take into account the public interest and the effect the performance of the office may have on the strategic economic or social importance of the State. We always put the economic interests first. The problem with our development planning system is that everyone is cheering for the economic side. The developers are looking for their slice and to have the lowest standards possible. The council officials are looking for as much development as possible to secure revenue to run the council. No one is standing up for the wider long-term planning issues around how we develop a low carbon society, how we protect our diversity, ensuring that we do not build on flood plains and how we can get our water system right. We would have been much better off if our planning system during the past 50 to 100 years had made such provision when it came to each planning application. I have seen an example of this in Sandyford in my local authority area. Planning was being proposed for many developments, including a skyscraper with alpine gardens on the 34th floor. We did not have the water or the wastewater system to accommodate that. It was a disastrous item of planning. All the planning had to be stopped in Sandyford Industrial Estate and that resulted in a half-finished estate because of a failure to bring together what we need to do, which is the water framework directive, the floods directive, the biodiversity action plan and our latest Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act. Putting them front and centre stage is the right way to go because they are the first elements that we need to get right, and if we do so, we will get higher quality development for social reasons, it will be more economically efficient in the long run because we will not have to go back to people who are stuck in the middle of a flood plain or we will not have to retrofit water infrastructure, which is incredibly expensive. We would be getting it right from the start.

We should be upfront in saying that what we want our planning system to do is to take the best of European regulations in the water framework directive, the national biodiversity action plan and the low carbon obligations. The reason we need to do that is that we are only starting to understand the scale of the change required for us to meet our climate change objectives. It must be stitched into everything. It must be front and centre of everything. Our transport system must be completely changed. We must also change our energy system and our buildings. People have to be brought back to the centre. We have to stop the sprawl. The reason we included these requirements in all these amendments is to come back to that central point. There is not a sufficient signal or emphasis on the environmental element which is also the same as the social element. There is a natural constituency to look after the economic; the economic will look after itself but it would be better if we were to get the environmental element right. That is what these amendments seek to do.