Mr. Niall Cussen:

That is a good spread of issues to go through and I am not going to try to go through them all myself. Colleagues will come in to add to my response. There are many very sensible ideas, proposals and comment there and I tend to agree with a lot of it.

By way of opening remarks, the purpose of the planning system is to ensure the right development happens in the right place at the right time. There is a structure and some sort of shape to how things happen over time. All the members of the committee I am sure would agree with me that in rural areas, in particular nobody is proposing a free-for-all. If we are starting with this basic principle or building block, we then have to have some sort of policies within which to avoid a free-for-all and structure our approach. What planning policy in Ireland has typically tended to do, particularly with regard to housing development in rural areas, is to distinguish between areas that are under intense pressure for development, as Deputy Healy-Rae mentioned, particularly the areas that are closest to our cities and our largest towns. To some extent if we do not have some sort of policy framework effectively these areas would be absorbed into the urban area very quickly. As the Chairman is aware, there are parts of south County Meath, for example, where we have had to retrofit sewerage schemes because effectively they became overdeveloped during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

In other administrations, particularly across the water, they have policies based on green belts. They distinguish between areas that are rural and areas that are urban. The only forms of development that take place in green belt areas are agri-industry, that is, people who are engaged in full-time large-scale farming or other occupational or functional links back to the rural areas. Bearing in mind Ireland's unique social history and the form of development in rural areas, we have settled our policies around distinguishing between housing that arises out of the linkages to a rural community and many members have mentioned this and those people coming from an area altogether different and want to build what are effectively urban-generated housing. My colleague, Mr. Terry Sheridan, will comment on where we are on some of the issues that have arisen with regard to this policy, the seven-year rule and similar conditions. We will come back to this.

On Senator Marie-Louise O'Donnell's points on the visual integrity and the quality of much of our development in recent years, we were building 90,000 homes a year for several years during the boom year. While homes were built that people needed and in the places that needed more housing, the quality of some of the development left a great deal to be desired, particularly the spectre of unfinished housing developments. We have resolved 85% of these unfinished developments through slog during the past five or six years. Senator O'Donnell asked for examples of bad planning. If the Senator picks up any copy of the annual reports we produce on resolving unfinished housing developments throughout the country, particularly in the upper Shannon area, which benefitted from the tax relief scheme there, she will see plenty of examples of small very pretty riverside or canal side villages, which in some cases were very adversely affected by the apartment block or housing estate that was plonked in from nowhere and bears little or no relationship to the character of the area.

We are grappling with a housing crisis so we must be mindful of those lessons and not forget them.