Mary White (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party)

He also called it an assault on local democracy. It is certainly not the Minister's intention to have an assault on local democracy. He wants to give more powers to local authorities and reform local government to ensure we have good sustainable planning. I do not think anybody in local government should fear this legislation if planning is sound and sustainable. Ireland is a small country and one in which there must be a regional and national co-ordination of planning. We cannot plan our towns and villages without considering population projections and dove-tailing county development plans and without having knowledge of the national infrastructural projects so that the provision of services would be linked to density of population.

Across the country, bad planning has been responsible for satellite towns springing up all over the place. One newspaper published a supplement that showed all the flooding around the country. One could see from the aerial photographs the madness of some planning. Some of the estates had names such as "Waterside" and "Bog Road". That was for obvious reasons. We should not be building houses in those places. Now these unfortunate people are suffering because of bad planning. This new Bill will put a stop to that.

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