Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Where is this revenue going? If this is an unauthorised development, where is the revenue going? At the same time, we are talking about by-laws and increasing riverboat and houseboat fees. I keep going back to this. It is not personal but I just cannot get my head around how, in this day and age, you cannot get a tap in Castleknock for an unserviced site without planning permission, yet 70 major developments without planning permission have gone on for years. I accept that some of these are legacy issues but I mentioned ones that have happened in the past three years. There is one near Leitrim village where there has been construction of a navigation channel marker for several boats that have been damaged there. We do not know what that will be.

I mentioned Carrick-on-Shannon where 100 m of reed bank has been dug out in the past 12 months. At Lough Derg, near Killaloe, a sizeable development has appeared in the past 12 months, encroaching on Irish Water property, and appears to be without the benefit of planning permission or encroachment licences. What do we tell the people who feel this is an unjust charge when something else is running in parallel at the same time? It should be a wonderful opportunity for Waterways Ireland to collect all that revenue. It is about improving everything, including services and so on, but why is there not an urgency to go after the fees in respect of unauthorised development instead of houseboats?