Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)

I can understand the context in which the Minister is making that assessment.

The Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2009 is a last gasp of a failed approach based on centralised planning obsessed with housing and settlement to the exclusion of positive planning for economic revival or sustaining communities. It is about planning and development, yet often local authorities and Departments are consumed with only one aspect of it. The Bill is illegal, illogical and indefensible. It seeks to support a system of planning based on a national spatial strategy that is unsustainable, unaccountable and uneconomic.

The Bill is an attempt to bolster a failed approach to planning by seeking to use the force of legislation where the force of argument has failed. It addresses the very real issue of people in rural areas seeking to build houses for income instead of the urgent need to understand why they are seeking income from such sources in the first place, namely regional inequality. This planning Bill wants to address the symptoms not the cause.

The cause of what is worst in Irish planning lies in its overly centralised nature. The command and control attitude of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government feels is based on the view that authorities are not to be trusted to determine their own future. I am not surprised that a Green Party Minister adopted a centralised approach. Deputy Gormley is the leader of a party that is now very much in tune with the wishes of Fianna Fáil whose members over the years have become masters in centralising authority. The best example is the Health Service Executive. Have we got a better service as a result?

In this legislation, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government is seeking to enshrine enormous powers of influence for any Minister of the day. While the Minister has all the well-meaning objectives of good planning, his successors might not. We have plenty of examples of past environment Ministers who subsequently became subject to intensive investigations in the Mahon and Flood tribunals. The Minister is giving a dangerous precedent to his successors with the powers he will give them in this legislation. On Committee Stage, will he examine how more controls can be placed on a future Minister who might lose the run of himself and undo some of the worthy objectives of the Bill?

The Bill does nothing to address the lack of devolution which corrodes the effectiveness of planning, especially in regional rural economies. Nor does it address the lack of integration between the planning of cities and counties. Instead, it seeks to create a top-down system whereby unaccountable civil servants in Dublin can send out letters to dictate the population for every major town in the State. This Bill seeks to fundamentally and finally secure this control by compelling the plans for every region, county, city, town and local area plan to conform to the national spatial strategy.

Stalin would be proud to see such centralised planning is alive and well in Ireland. How can the Minister claim this Bill improves accountability and local democracy when it seeks to strip local government of the last vestiges of its authority? How can he claim to be ensuring balanced regional development while this Bill transfers back to the Department in Dublin all power to plan for the future of regions and rural areas?

At the heart of the legislation is a proposal for a core strategy that will compel plans for every region, county, city, town and village to demonstrate they conform to the targets of the national spatial strategy. These targets are being set by unelected and unaccountable departmental officials without reference to economic, environmental or demographic reality. In the mad world envisioned by this Bill, every area will not only be forced to comply with a plan that has been unaccountably prepared, they will be forced to comply with a plan that is wrong.

The economic reality is the majority of Ireland's tax revenue is generated in the east. However, now when we are most desperately in need of national economic regeneration, we are asked to conform to a national spatial strategy that seeks to contain and control the nation's main economic engine - Dublin. This is wrong.

The environmental effects of the implementation of the national spatial strategy are unknown. What will its effects be on air pollution, noise pollution, energy construction and road building? What will be the effects of a strategy which proposes to create significantly more population in more widely dispersed places that lack adequate public transport while suppressing growth in the area with the highest concentration of high capacity public transport and the highest levels of public transport use? We do not know. What will be the effect on scenery, habitats, groundwaters and surface waters due to a strategy based on moving more population into the some of the country's most beautiful and fragile ecosystems? Again, we do not know. The national spatial strategy has never been discussed in the House or adopted by it. It will be decided by the Minister and his officials in the Customs House.

Basing our entire planning system on a strategy we do not know about is illegal, unwise and wrong. A national spatial strategy that behaves like a misguided rural county councillor who believes that granting more houses will somehow magically make more people is deluded. Settlement strategies do not make populations grow. Yet this failed strategy, which the Bill will enforce using the core strategy provision, is solely based on settlement strategies. How many circular letters does the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government send out about targets for jobs, facilitating rural enterprise or job creation? Where are these targets? Planning to grow based on settlement alone is wrong.

The Bill is illegal because it seeks to create a framework for all planning decisions on the basis of a national spatial strategy that has not been subjected to a strategic environmental assessment, or appropriate assessment, as required by two separate EU directives. The irony is the Department will strenuously insist that every plan subsequently based on the strategy must comply with these directives. This is a gross illegality.

The Bill is indefensible because it seeks to enforce settlement targets. It treats personal decisions about where people will choose to live and rear their families as if they are boxes on shelves that can be re-arranged at the whim of an official in the Department. The Minister will agree we live in a democracy. His Green Paper on local government sought to bring about the implementation of the principle of subsidiarity. However, since the June 2009 local elections he is moving away from that.

The Bill's provisions, requiring all development plans to contain a core strategy in compliance with the national spatial strategy, which itself is demonstrably wrong, are a mistake. All such provisions must be removed from the Bill because they are illegal, illogical and indefensible.

The wonderful economist, the late Mr. Paul Tansey, used to bemoan that so few understood the difference between administration, the prudent use of public resources, and management, which is about making plans, having vision, taking risks and providing leadership. It is important in times of financial crisis to understand the difference. In such times, it is tempting to see the world solely in terms of the symptoms of a problem, which is essentially finances and figures. Administration, which is the proper business of the public service, will never beat a path to the future. The accountant is only put in charge when the company is in receivership. Only dynamic leadership can tackle the root cause of today's problems and provide the growth, competitiveness and tax returns that will pay for social betterment. Administration, by its very nature, cannot and will never deliver this.

Irish public administration is one of Europe's most centralised. Report after report from official bodies and commissions have pointed out how inefficient and damaging this is, in particular for peripheral and rural areas. Genuine efforts to address this problem were made in the Barrington report 1991 and by the devolution commission in 1997. However, vested interests, some political but mostly from within the public service, have prevented or diverted efforts at real change. In times of stress, we all revert to familiar patterns of behaviour regardless of how destructive. One of Ireland's worst habits is centralisation. Evidence of this reflexive behaviour when faced with stress can be seen in the McCarthy report proposals to abolish the Western Development Commission, Shannon Development, the regional authorities and 30% of local authorities. The coming months will see many more proposals. The Minister for Transport, Deputy Dempsey, got in on the act when he said we should abolish city and county councils. All of these proposals which are put forward on the basis of lowering costs, creating greater efficiencies will further remove from specialist agencies any control or accountability.

What is it about centralisation that so excites those in power? Centralisation offers the promise of effectiveness through greater oversight, efficiency and co-ordination. While this sounds reasonable, to date centralised Departments have provided no effective oversight of children's welfare, the banks, the health system, export guarantee systems or any of the other scandals that have cost us hundreds of millions of euros in inquiries. I do not believe that locally autonomous governance would be any worse.

In practice, centralisation reduces the effectiveness and efficiency of public action and spending while at the same time suppressing local initiative, responsiveness and competitiveness. For example, a new public marina in Connemara would require the involvement of at least four central Departments, namely, the Departments of Arts, Sport and Tourism, Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Communications, Marine and Natural Resources and Finance and that of local officials and agencies. Every extra layer guarantees more delays, more administrative and compliance costs and less likelihood of meeting anybody with the narrowest of local needs. On many levels, therefore, it is a poor use of resources.

Irish people are often surprised to learn that throughout most of the European Union regional and local authorities collect local taxes. They oversee and pay for a range of services which we have come to accept as the sole prerogative of centralised Departments and agencies. Such authorities are usually responsible for services, including public transport, education, policing, energy, tourism and environmental protection. This devolution of responsibility, from which the Minister is moving away, offers significant opportunities to plan and integrate the delivery and operation of these functions to ensure maximum use of all public spending and administration. A locally controlled public bus can do school runs, hospital drop-offs for the elderly, local deliveries and support local tourism facilities and as such is responsive and responsible for local needs, which is good planning.

Devolution is not decentralisation or relocation or the type of policies we have had during recent years dressed up as decentralisation which merely transfers the seat of a centralised authority to a regional location. This is, at best naive and at worst cynical. It does nothing to address the fundamental problems of an excessively centralised State, the size and cost of bloated and centralised Departments or their inflexibility, unresponsiveness or lack of accountability.

What is the opposite of centralisation? It is not every county for itself: that cannot be the case. It is about co-ordinated competition and agreement and assignment of specialisations and roles according to the needs and strengths. A one size fits all system will not work. It is not about a Stalinist centralised plan for Ireland: it is about a mosaic of different and distinctive destinies, some large, some small. Some regions have greater strengths than others. Some locations will have an industrial future and others will have a future in tourism. Some will have service sectors based on educational cultures and others will have a future based on science and finance. While some will have all of these, others will have only a few.

The McCarthy report merely treats the economic symptoms and is not a plan to tackle the root causes of our current problems. A collection of cuts should not be mistaken for a plan. Positive, proactive planning lies at the heart of good management. Right now, Ireland needs a plan. However, the only plan that appears to emerge is a reining in of power to an increasingly small number of more centralised institutions.

Ireland's current model for economic growth which is principally based upon attracting mobile inward investment is now defunct. We have lost our competitiveness and distinctiveness. Many nations are now significantly cheaper, better regulated and more responsive than us. We may never again be a low cost country. Perhaps we do not want to be but we must plan for this. We need a long term plan based on capitalising on our many unique selling points, including the demographic, educational, technical and entrepreneurial skills we have developed. A further entrenchment of the already negative effects of excessive concentration would be damaging to this effort.

There will always be a place for national planning in regard to national major infrastructural needs such as energy and transport. We will also need centralisation in terms of fairness, equality and competitiveness. A properly ordered State has layers of government, some central, some local to deal with the challenges locally and nationally. In a properly ordered State, there is a clear and coherent division of roles which accord to two fundamental tenets, including how the EU interacts with member states. The first is to have a clear and coherent hierarchy of where power is administered, the principle of subsidiarity. It is rather ironic that we recently voted for this in the Lisbon referendum and are now seeking to again take centralised control and defy the principle of subsidiarity of which the people want more.

We need positive planning, not a patch and fix of the McCarthy report nor the economic and social negativity of a national spatial strategy, of which we know little, to get us out of our mess. We need a purposeful plan for Ireland to foster the island in all of its diversity, large and small, regional and local where every region is able to play to its strengths and exploit opportunities.

The Minister has brought forward in the legislation a number of proposals which seek to confirm the tenet of centralised planning. He mentioned the attendance of Carlow County Council SPC at a recent committee meeting on this legislation. It is distressing to members of Carlow County Council that the implications of this legislation will be the building of 60 houses over a seven year period in places like Tullow, Rathvilly, Bagnelstown and the rural hinterlands. I do not know if that information is correct.

See this speech in context