Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I thank everybody for their contributions. I will pick up on and add to some of the debate, because many of the problems are being identified but sometimes the solutions may be misunderstood. To pick up on Senator Casey's discussion about the local planning framework in Wicklow, I have no skin in that game and no opinion on whether the plan is good or not, but the interesting thing is that the local authority and elected members there have an obligation to be consistent with the development plan, which was agreed in 2022. There has been no dezoning of land between that development plan and the local planning framework. That is not me saying that the zoning that is in the planning framework is correct or not. There has been no dezoning.

One of the challenges is that Wicklow does not have a zoning map, unlike South Dublin, which has a full zoning map when it does its plan. Wicklow County Council and its elected members, as far as I can see, were left in an invidious position where they had to produce a local planning framework that complied with the development plan, and yet, at the same time, the Government was belatedly updating the outdated national planning framework, and I agree with all of the criticisms of that. For me, what that shows is not a weakness of the elected members or the executive but that the process which the Government had put in place for a local authority to make a decision was completely back-to-front, because when a local authority comes to do the development plan review, it has to reconsider all of the issues we are discussing here, to be compliant with the new national planning framework.

This is not a comment about anybody who is in the room today, but some of the public commentary by some Government Ministers, effectively blaming a local authority and its elected members for a plan, where that plan has to be compliant with the development plan, is not honest in terms of understanding the problems. Our difficulty with the zoning is that local authorities were told on 29 July what their new targets and headroom are. I think the headroom is probably about right. The question now is how quickly they can turn around those material alterations, but those plans all expire in 2028 anyway. I am with Mr. Garvey, in that I think the ten-year plans will make a big difference. I think some of the public debate on this is not factually accurate about where the blame is.

The system for taking decisions on zoning and local planning frameworks is completely disjointed. The big problem with the planning system is that we do not have enough staff. There was a suggestion from some people recently that we should have 20 SDZs or UDZs. I am a big fan of SDZs. I would like to make them simpler, more nimble and more flexible. In that context, we need another 400-plus planners at local authority level. We need a significant increase in the planning staff of An Coimisiún Pleanála. Unless we get that, it does not matter what legislative changes we make. Some of the bigger projects might get a bit of prioritisation but the small and medium-sized projects will be left behind because LRDs are not being done and there are no statutory timelines. An appeal to the board may sit there for a year.

I would like to see fewer JRs. I would also like the Government to properly resource the planning court. If people are going to take JRs, they should not take two years. No matter what is done with the legislation, we should have good-practice guidelines from the court on a statutory footing. We should have at least six judges on the planning panel, and everybody should know how long a JR is going to last.

The then Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, came before the select committee last year. We spent a hundred hours in this room dealing with the Planning and Development Bill 2024. He told us that the latter was going to fix matters relating to judicial review. Now we are told there is going to be more legislation. The real issue is to actually put the resources into forward planning, master planning, the commission and the courts. A lot of that stuff will actually fix itself. Prior to SHD and Eoghan Murphy's and Simon Coveney's disastrous SPPRs and building heights and design standards, JRs in respect of residential developments were virtually unheard of. Mr. Garvey is right that the challenge is actually not in respect of large-scale residential developments but rather on strategic infrastructure developments. However, they do not go through the five stages of consultative planning because that is more like an SHD process. This has to be addressed.

On infrastructure, I am genuinely delighted. I keep my contributions at this committee as collegiate as possible. However, when we did the Planning and Development Bill 2024, the utility companies formed a caucus and lobbied the committee and the Minister and his officials like crazy to include two very straightforward changes regarding critical infrastructure. One was that critical infrastructure planning applications should be prioritised and go to the front of the queue. The second was that there should be parallel planning and licensing consents. We proposed those as amendments to the Planning and Development Bill 2024, but the Government would not accept them. Here we are again now having a conversation about critical infrastructure deficits, about which I share the concerns. I am saying some of this because we have a lot of new members on the committee. Deputy McAuliffe was here with us in the previous committee and Senator Casey was a member of the committee before that. Many of the issues we are discussing have already been discussed over and over again. Very sensible and credible solutions have been proposed. While there has been a bit of progress, it has been very frustrating. I just want that reflected in the conversation.

To go back to the SME sector, we can get more zoned land and we can increase the amount of HBFI funding or maybe some bank lending at lower interest rates. Our SME sector is more traditional in terms of its building technologies and output. If those types of changes being asked for were made, how long would it take to scale up and double the output in order to fill the 40% gap? There is broad consensus around some of the key levers of accelerating supply among companies in the SME sector if they were done. I am not hearing about them being done at present. What kind of timeline would be needed in this regard?

For Glenveagh and Cairn, let us talk about the positives. SDZs have been positive, but they take a long time. I was on South Dublin County Council when we started Clonburris in 2014. Construction started in 2021. Once the URDF funding went in, it accelerated rapidly. What do we need to see in the roll-out of UDZs to take the benefits of the SDZs and compress them in order that there is not such a long lead-in time? If we could find a way of doing them in a more time-efficient and nimble way, we could have real benefits, not just in the big strategic sites but we could also use the UDZs at smaller regional sites as well.