Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

I will speak until they arrive or the time runs out. Every Bill has a context. The context of this one can be summed up by the phrase, "Time is money." The Government would present this as being public time and money, but any analysis of the colossal excess expenditure on public projects in the lifetime of the Government will show that the factors that have caused the excessive spending are not those which the Bill attempts to address. It was not an overly democratic planning process that caused this excess expenditure. It was bad management, bad decision-making and planning on the hoof which tried to change the context of what was to be built and how it was to be built.

The roads programme is a case in point. The national development plan roads programme went from a costing of £580 million to an eventual cost of €1.8 billion, mainly because the Government decided as the plan was being rolled out that the roads identified by the National Roads Authority were not sufficient to the Government's needs and would have to be broadened and expanded, despite the fact they could not be justified in road traffic terms.

If one is looking for excuses why projects are delayed and why costs have over-run, one need look no further than the Government party benches. It is the quality of the decisions made and the wasteful way public money was wilfully spent that has brought us to this sorry pass.

It is laughable that the notion that our planning laws are too democratic is entertained by the House. I have been through the planning process many times in my constituency. On each occasion I found it to operate against the interests of the citizen. The Bill contains nothing to address the need for proper prioritisation in seeking planning permission and integrated pollution licences from the Environmental Protection Agency.

There were just two public oral hearings on the national toxic waste incinerator proposal for the Ringaskiddy area in my constituency, one for An Bord Pleanála and one for the EPA, each of which was a flawed process. In each case, a private developer, who was seeking to impose what the Government terms as strategic infrastructure, was assisted by the State and its agencies to impose on a community a project which many of us believe is unnecessary and, if built, will have many dangerous consequences.

The An Bord Pleanála oral hearing was a farce. The senior planning inspector listened to the case for a number of weeks and brought a report to An Bord Pleanála that listed 14 different grounds why the incinerator should not proceed. However, the board chose to ignore this hard-hitting report from its own inspector and to approve the project on the basis that this was a Government policy priority. How can citizens have confidence in the planning process if they participate in the process, it shows them they are correct in the arguments they make, yet the board, which is largely composed of political appointees, makes such a negative decision against those citizens' interests?

This is the type of reform in which the Government should engage but is far from interested in doing. As part of the same process, an integrated pollution licence was subsequently sought from the EPA. That was subsequently granted on the basis of reviewing a decision the EPA had made. These are the inconsistencies that will be eventually exposed to court actions which will have been brought about because of bad legislation introduced by the Government. While we have a Government that wants to represent vested interests over the interests of the citizen, we will get legislation of this nature. This is not in the interest of public infrastructure but of private developers who have offered to provide various infrastructure the Government has identified as being needs of the State. There has been no wide-ranging proper public debate on whether the infrastructure is needed or if it is the right type of infrastructure.

The Government likes to congratulate itself on any development by erecting national development plan signs wherever it can. This money belongs to the public. We need to ask whether it is being spent in the right way, and in many ways it is not. In the roads programme, a type of infrastructure the Government has identified, it is far from being spent in the right way. We can certainly see, once those decisions are made, that the Government has been a failure. As a member of the Committee of Public Accounts, it never ceases to amaze me how public money is pumped into infrastructural projects without proper pre-planning or accountability. This is largely because the funding mechanisms the Government has chosen to use are not the standard State mechanisms that have proved largely successful in the past. Given that the new mechanisms are direct partnerships with private enterprise, the State is exposed unnecessarily to spending these huge sums of money with little to be seen in terms of improved public infrastructure.

On the general question of how democratic is our planning system, Deputy Upton put her finger on the button when she said that a fee must be paid for planning objections. The tenor of much of the debate so far implies that any person who seeks to make an objection or an observation is one who is holding up a process. The reality is that the process already has a set time and if nobody chooses to make an objection, it will not be completed any sooner. The subsequent objections to An Bord Pleanála and court actions are different arguments. The right of people to observe and object should be enhanced in legislation and not constantly undermined. The Government lives by the myth that somehow its programme, which it sees as exclusively its programme and not the programme for the country's needs, is hampered by a few individuals who are vexatious in their philosophy and just exist to stop the building of infrastructure.

It is right and proper for citizens to ask questions because we have seen in the past week where the failure to ask questions leads us. Sadly this is a Government that chooses not to ask questions. It bull-headedly proceeds with projects and we all suffer the consequences later. This is a cost on the right of citizens to object and appeal that intensifies through the An Bord Pleanála process where people must pay upwards of €300 for a public oral hearing. I have seen vexatiousness on the part of developers who have made multiple planning applications on the same site to ensure that people who are likely to object will have to pay An Bord Pleanála hundreds of euro on each occasion. These are the areas that are in need of reform. These are the vested interests that benefit from our planning system.

It is not a failure of democracy that is at fault. It is a philosophy of a Government that is unwilling, because of where it gets support and how it funds its activities, to challenge the vested interests who wish to see any type of development in any circumstance taking place. As custodians of our society, we have a right to check and challenge development to ensure it is right type of development and one with which we, our children and future generations are happy. Sadly the legacy of the Government is one that history will judge harshly. When reforms take place in the planning area, it will not be the parties of this Government that will introduce such legislation.

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