Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

I commend An Comhaontas Glas for tabling this motion and I express the full support of the Sinn Féin Deputies for it. It is often said that the people are suffering from tribunal fatigue. Since 1997, the planning tribunal under Mr. Justice Flood and Mr. Justice Mahon has slowly exposed the complex web of planning corruption in and around our capital city. This has been a very cumbersome and drawn-out process. The tribunals now seldom make the headlines. It is true that many people have switched off, but that does not mean that people have forgotten or have absolved those involved in planning corruption — far from it. The tribunals have been a process of education, confirming what many of us suspected for years — that there was a corrupt relationship between developers, property speculators and the establishment political parties in this State. In recent times, certain senior members of those parties have admitted receiving very large payments.

Although we cannot go into detail, It is crystal clear to anyone with a brain that those payments were not made by developers out of the goodness of their hearts. Conveniently, certain witnesses claim that they have forgotten about payments made to them. The tribunal may find that in most or all cases, there was no evidence of illegality. It may not even use the word "corruption", but only the most naive and the most partisan can refuse to believe that Dublin County Council in the 1980s was rotten with corruption. The developers and speculators called the shots.

Two questions arise. What was the result and what has changed? The result was bad planning on a massive scale. People were housed in what were often badly built and badly serviced estates with few facilities. We live with the legacy of that to this day. Large and often sub-standard local authority estates were built with communities experiencing high unemployment. The speculators stripping the inner city for profit forced long-established communities out of the city and into these suburbs. That is part of the forgotten human cost of corruption.

The brown envelope culture has been exposed but it has been replaced with the institutionalised brown envelope. This Government's housing policy is driven not by the housing needs of families and individuals but by the profit motive of developers and speculators who still call the shots. Early this month housing figures exposed the abject failure of this Government's social and affordable housing policy. They confirmed that we now have legalised and institutionalised bribery of local authorities by developers, facilitated by this Government. It has allowed developers to bribe their way out of providing social housing under Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000. As originally passed, this Act required developers to devote 20% of each housing development to social and affordable housing. The friends of Fianna Fáil in the construction industry raised an almighty clamour and the Act was amended to allow them to side-step this obligation by paying money or providing land to local authorities. Seldom has a lobby succeeded in getting a law changed in such a short time.

The amending legislation to allow the developers off the hook was rammed through the Dail with the use of the guillotine in December 2002 and it has turned out exactly as we predicted. It has done nothing to provide homes for those most in need of them. It has fuelled the spiralling cost of housing and encouraged property speculation. We now find that of 80,000 new homes built last year, only 830 were allocated to local authorities under Part V of the Act. That is not much more than 1% of all housing and is a far cry from the intended 20%. Since 2002, more than 230,000 homes have been completed for sale on the market, a third of which are second homes or owned by investors. At the best estimate, just over 1,600 have been provided under Part V of the Act. That is pathetic.

When Part V was introduced in 1999 the then Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Deputy Noel Dempsey, said "the plan will lead to an additional 35,000 local authority units, an increase in the voluntary housing sector provision of houses . . . to 4,000 a year and an increase to 2,000 units per year under the current local authority affordable housing and shared ownership schemes". That reads like a bad joke. Less than 6% of all housing now being built is local authority housing. More than 130,000 people are denied decent housing in one of the wealthiest states in Europe. When I raised this with the Taoiseach recently at Leaders' Questions, his ears were closed. If the Government were really sincere about housing and planning, it would reinstate the requirement on developers to provide homes under Part V, implement the recommendations in the report of the National Economic and Social Forum and set a target for the provision of homes for the 43,600 households on local authority waiting lists.

I have been calling for a just social housing policy since my election in 1997. There is no prospect that this Government will change course in its remaining time in power. I can only hope that we can place our trust and faith in the people and that we will see real and substantive change after the next general election.

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