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

I thank Deputy O'Callaghan for tabling this amendment. As some of the Minister of State's officials will know from their time in South Dublin County Council, this is a huge issue for what we might call Celtic tiger-era, legacy taking-in-charge cases. It is also a current issue. There is a small residential development that was built a number of years ago in my constituency for which planning permission was granted, and construction and purchase happened, after the economic crash. As part of the condition of planning permission, a developer was to provide a temporary access road.

A bond was provided for that. There was also a road opening required for wastewater connections from the main road and a bond was provided for that. The developer in question broke the terms of the road opening licence and did not adequately connect the wastewater infrastructure, with very significant negative impacts for the residents. The developer never completed the temporary road access and then eventually just stopped engaging. This was during the five-year period of the planning permission. Since that expired maybe two years ago, the residents have been in the most unenviable position of trying to engage the local authority in terms of releasing portions of the bond for the purposes of completing the works and making their lived environment adequate and appropriate. The local authority will not do that. Even if it did, the bonds that were laid at the time of the original grant of planning permission are nowhere close to covering the cost of the works that are required. Worse still, the developer in completing portions of the development did not comply with basic standards in terms of roads, footpaths, material, street lighting, etc. Uisce Éireann is currently taking the developer to court to try to cover the costs of fixing the wastewater treatment issues. The developer and taking in charge issues are live, however.

The reason I am giving a little bit more detail about this case is because it is current. This is not a matter of Celtic tiger-era developers that went bust during the crash and then receivers took over and there were long, protracted battles between receivers, residents and the council. This is still happening today. We received a report recently from South Dublin County Council on all the outstanding taking in charge issues. One of the questions I asked was about how many of those bonds are index linked and how many are not. The majority of them are not index linked. That means it is so far away from covering the costs for the Celtic tiger era ones you would not believe it. Even for the ones that are a few years post expiration of planning permission, the gap is huge. The local authority's position is that it is not its job to use taxpayers' money to fund work the developer should have done but did not. This amendment is, therefore, very good and timely.

We had limited discussion on this at pre-planning, but it is one of those areas, a little bit like planning enforcement, where this Bill could have been an opportunity to make some really good improvements and changes that protect both the people who move into these new developments and the taxpayer. I appreciate the taxpayer should not have to foot the bill every time a developer goes rogue, albeit at a lower level currently then we would have seen in the early stages of the Celtic tiger house-building boom. We are beginning to see numbers of developers not completing developments and people are spending very considerable sums of money. In the case of the residential street I am talking about, they are not palaces or mansions. They are very good quality starter homes that cost €400,000. These are working families and working couples, some of whom are not on big incomes. They have worked and saved for years, however, and two, three or four years into their homeownership, the quality of their lives has been so badly damaged by this entire conundrum. The indexing of the bond and the scheduling for taking in charge of works, as it currently stands, does not work in those kinds of cases. We have 25 or 30 of them in south Dublin. Mr. Ryan will know from memory that there are some quite large ones in Adamstown, Newcastle and Rathcoole. If the Minister of State is not accepting the amendment, this is one area in which work needs to be done between now and Report Stage or in the Seanad to take the opportunity of this Bill to deal with a really significant and important issue for a not inconsiderable number of people.