Mr. Terry Shannon:

I have people who were newly married and who are now grandparents. We have been waiting 35 years for one estate in my ward in Cork city. There are a couple of issues. First, it should be a condition of planning that there is sufficient funding in a bond. From my experience, some local authority officials have been lax in chasing up the bonds and ensuring they are cashed in in a timely fashion when trouble is there because, as the Deputy said, you go looking for the bond and there is insufficient funding. It then falls on local authorities. The estate is not up to standard, it takes resources and we do not have them. The piggy in the middle are the residents who come to local authority members. We are at the coalface. It should be a condition of planning that there is a bond, whether it is a cash bond or whatever.

We need to look at developers who walk away from unfinished estates and leave residents with unfinished roads and lighting, then go off to build somewhere else within the local authority. As part of the legislation, we should not give developers planning for a further development until they have finished or are seen to be finishing the estate they have. We have too much of that going on around the country. They move on and, as we all know with a builder, plumber or electrician in your house, once they are gone they are gone. It is like the ad on television. That is a problem but the local authority members are the piggy in the middle and have to deal with it. I would add those to the Deputy’s wish list.