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

It is fine for the Minister of State to say that he does not support bad actors, and of course he does not. However, if the Government does not give the local authorities the tools to adequately enforce and weed out the bad actors, it amounts to the same thing. I have given the Minister of State a current example of a developer who has a building, fully occupied since 2018, with no planning permission and no building control compliance – zero. The local authority is using the existing powers under planning enforcement and the Building Control (Amendment) Regulations 2014. This is all a matter of public record. The developer, because he is a pretty canny individual, has managed to circumvent those, and today there is a building fully occupied with tenants paying the top-end of market rent from their own pockets, through the housing assistance payments or homeless HAP. He does not have planning permission and he is not compliant with BCAR. That very same individual has subsequently got planning permissions and is building out other developments, one of which in Dublin city is also facing planning enforcement. This is not about property rights. This is about the current rules not being fit for purpose. My question was whether any assessment was done as to the efficacy of those provisions under this section when a decision was being taken by the Department and the senior Minister to simply copy and paste existing - in my view, inadequate - rules into this Bill. Did anybody ask whether this is one of the areas of this legislation that needs to be changed or amended, how many occasions this provision has been used and whether there was an assessment or study? The reason we get so engaged in this, and I suspect the Minister of State is aware of this in his own constituency, is that we all represent people who live in defective buildings, buildings without adequate planning and buildings that are still being built in breach of these rules, albeit on a lower scale, thankfully, than we had during the Celtic tiger. One of the big weaknesses is planning enforcement and building control enforcement. That is why this section absolutely deserves strengthening. This is not about saying to throw the Constitution out. Somewhere between dispensing of property rights and what is going on in the developments I mentioned there has to be a better form of enforcement. Somebody who has a clear track record of breaching planning permissions and building control regulations should not be allowed to get planning permissions and he currently is.