Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be here representing the Regional Group of Independent TDs. I remember being elected to the council in 2004, which is 20 years ago now. I am getting old. At that time, when I got elected, I was excited by the thought that I was going to make a difference. I remember one of the things I was working on at the time was wastewater treatment plants in our towns and villages. At the time, Galway County Council had a list of projects to be done. We had feasibility studies on them, and then Irish Water arrived on the scene. That list has disappeared, and, 20 years later, the matter is still not on anybody's agenda. We have a housing crisis and local authorities will not allow us to build houses in villages because we do not have a municipal wastewater treatment plant, as decided by An Bord Pleanála in planning decisions. In my county, we have 30 villages frozen out of the planning system because we do not have a municipal wastewater treatment plant. That is the legacy Irish Water has given to Galway County Council. There is something wrong with that.

Turning to planning, there was a huge meeting in Portumna last night on a gas-fired generator plant that is going to be built there. The first meeting was last Thursday night. I was asked to go to it. There is an application with An Bord Pleanála for what we call strategic infrastructural development. Not one councillor on Galway County Council was made aware of that.

It was in there and the clock was clicking on submissions. The entire local authority representation is being bypassed. They are not getting a chance to discuss these them because they are now going directly into An Bord Pleanála. The planning regulator powers supersede everybody. When the planning regulator makes a comment on even a local area plan and makes a recommendation on it, if the council does not follow it, the Minister gives a direction that it has to be done. That has happened in the past number of weeks in Athenry where people are trying to build houses. We have this thing we call the core strategy in planning, which to me is BS because it means nothing. It is reducing the amount of land that is available to build houses on and it is making the development land more expensive. What do we do? We decide to bring in a residential zoned land tax and we are going to tax farmers who never want to zone the land for residential purposes because they are farming it. This is the grand idea we have but it is not coming from the local authority or the local authority members; it is coming from - I would not even say from central government - people who are appointed and who make decisions for the country without actually knowing damn all about what they are doing. I am very annoyed about all of that. The biggest problem we have in Galway County Council is funding. I am speaking to that because I know most about that particular county. Since I entered the Dáil, I have been trying to get from the Department the matrix by which the equalisation fund is managed and each local authority is funded by it. I hope the Ministers are listening to this. The Department has failed to give me that matrix. It is not transparent, nobody knows how it makes this up, and there has been political interference historically into what counties got in local government funding. I would like to see on everybody's manifesto that we would see a transparent matrix by which local authorities are funded. Galway County Council is one of the poorest counties in terms of funding per head of population. We have islands and a Gaeltacht and the county is the second largest in Ireland. The knock-on effect is that we have only four or five housing liaison officers in the county. Cork has something like 20.

Going back to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan's point about apprenticeships, one of the biggest things we have coming down the road is that we are building social housing out of face at the moment. That is great but there is not one dickybird about how we are going to finance the maintenance of this asset the State will own. What I mean by the way houses are being now, with the technology that is being put in for heating systems and whatever else and how that will be maintained and renewed. Who is thinking about and putting money aside to do that? The local authorities are expected to do that but they are not given the resources. Active travel is another classic example where the NTA has stopped funding the local authorities until they produce a plan for every town and village they want to put a footpath in. They have to go through a process of preparing this plan, do grandiose paperwork on it and the funding is not coming until all of that is done. Who is this for? Who is going to read it? The local councillors know what is needed in their towns and villages. They are the people who should be making the decisions and the money should flow to them but that is not happening. If we are making any manifesto proposals from this committee, we have to reset the dial on local government. We need to bring back town councils and make sure the councillor we elect has the power to make decisions because they are the people who know.