Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My colleague Deputy Gould has been too generous. The precise function of these sections of the Bill is to further weaken and undermine the role of local government - not just the elected members but also the executive. As Deputy O'Callaghan has said, there is no way of reading these sections other than interpreting them as taking a system which is already heavily centralised - one of the most centralised systems if not the most centralised system of governance in Europe - and further centralising it. There is increasingly less scope for local authorities, their executives and their elected members to really shape these development plans.

Why is that important? It is important because the electorate could decide to choose a different complexion of elected members in a certain area and they would like to see that reflected in the development plan. I have always considered that in the interrelationship between local government and central government, particularly in these matters, local government should set the floor, the minimum standards which should be very high in various ways, but there needs to be scope for the local authorities to raise the bar, raise the standards or have variations that reflect the democratically expressed wishes of their populations. All of this is designed to limit that.

There are real world examples. For example, when SHD was introduced, there were two driving factors. There was concern that the good people of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown had a tendency to elect folks who had a more green and environmental complexion in their politics and that filtered its way through the development plan. There were particular elements of the development plan that developers did not like and they wanted to challenge them. Dublin City Council, because it was trying to ensure proper planning and mixed family sizes in its urban core, wanted different standards of apartment size, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments, to accommodate different family sizes.

All of this is the latest element of trying to squeeze that ability out of our local government system to make those kinds of variations. It is the latest in a series of iterations of that. Each iteration fails. The section 28 guidelines failed; the SHDs failed and we have come back with this.

I wish to respond specifically to what the Minister said. The section states:

(1) This section applies where the Minister is satisfied that— (a) an event or situation with significant national, regional or strategic implications has occurred or is likely to occur ...".

While I accept that, the Minister gets to decide. That is very wide and broad. The two examples he gave, of Covid and Brexit, do not need this. He is absolutely right that the Covid pandemic meant we needed to do things we would not have otherwise done in a very timely fashion. Changes to exempted development requirements were put through the House with co-operation from this side as well as from the Government. Within the existing legislative planning framework, we can deal with those things but changing a development plan is not responding to an immediate emergency.

It is making a more fundamental change to the planning code in a particular area. I do not see how the Minister could say that is anything but draconian, centralising, and antithetical to local democracy and the principles of subsidiarity. None of that is an argument against consistency. It is just a question of where is the line. Where does the role and responsibility of central government begin and end, and where does the role of local government begin and end? Increasingly, all local government does is it takes policy direction and instruction and, ultimately, if it is not willing to take it, it gets enforced.

I reiterate that the amendment is very simple and straightforward - I will not repeat it - but these really are very damaging structural changes to our planning system and they will not work. We will be back here at some point in the future if they are passed and enacted, having to undo this latest round of damage, like we had to do with SHDs, mandatory ministerial guidelines and specific planning policy requirements, SPPRs, etc. That means we are not learning from the failures of the previous attempts to do these kinds of things.

The great thing is that when councillors from the Minister's party start to fully understand the implications of this change, when this becomes the law, they will be up in arms, just like they were when they fully understood the implications of SHDs, on which Fianna Fáil abstained when the party was in opposition. I urge Members to be mindful of that. We had good presentations from elected members and local authorities. We are not against the idea of consistency. I am not against the idea of national government setting national policy and law but subsidiarity just dissolves and disappears in all of this. It is deeply problematic. I do not understand why the Minister would want to be the one to implement these very damaging changes to our planning system. They are really inappropriate and will come back to cause significant damage in the future.