Tom Sheahan (Kerry South, Fine Gael)

Call it what one likes, it is immoral. It might not be the people who own the land today but the next generation who will be nailed for the tax.

During the production of local area plans, I saw land being zoned even though its owners did not want it zoned. I went to the forward planning section of Kerry County Council on behalf of several people who had asked for their land to be removed from certain local area plans because they did not want it zoned. The staff asked me if I was for real, and I said "Yes." I said there were several farmers who did not want their land ever to be built on because they wanted to pass it on to the next generation. The land was eventually removed from the local area plans.

With the way the Minister is going about it, we will find that after the dezoning of land has been completed, the staff of the local authorities will automatically begin to produce local area plans again. It is a futile exercise and the only reason for it is to nail landowners for the 80% windfall tax. I do not think this should be going ahead. I believe it is to be challenged in the courts, and rightly so. Members should not get me wrong; I am not trying to speak up for the developer that bought land at €500,000 or €600,000 per acre to develop. I am talking about the landowner whose land was zoned when it was still in his or her ownership.

EPA guidelines are produced nearly every year now, and they are being upgraded every year, to the extent that many of the planners and environmentalists in our local authorities are giving half their time to training courses. I am currently involved in a case in which the EPA, after three months, has not yet replied to a scientist who is working on behalf of an applicant for planning permission. I cannot understand why it has not replied in the space of three months.

The Minister of State, Deputy Finneran, who was here when I came in, is a man I hold in great esteem. I believe he is doing a good job. He is the one man who is trying to do something for the construction industry. The only show in town at present is the funding he has provided for local authorities for long-term lease arrangements - a scheme to which I give 100% support. The man must be commended on thinking outside the box and trying to get things moving.

This is a reaction to what has happened in the past decade. Why did we have a property bubble? Who created it and why did it spiral out of control? The 2006 census found that there were 215,000 unoccupied houses in the country, of which 51,000 were holiday homes, which meant that 165,000 houses were empty year-round. Government policy was to build 90,000 units per year. Will anybody be brought to book for this? That is the reason the whole country is in the doldrums - bad governance and bad decisions made by Government. It was the tent at the Galway races with the developers and the bankers. Government policy, with 215,000 unoccupied houses, was to build 90,000 units per year. At one stage we were told Ireland would have a population of 8 million by a certain year - although I cannot remember which year - so we had to keep building these houses, we had to keep zoning, and we had to keep developing.

There are 22 ghost estates in Kerry. I can safely say, hand on heart, that no member of the local authority is responsible for those 22 estates - or at least, no elected member. Planning is a function of the executive and those involved made executive decisions to grant planning permission for those estates, yet the person seeking planning permission for a one-off rural house receives a blank "No." It is a shambles. I am afraid the Minister is attempting to centralise the whole planning function of the local authorities to his Department. It will be a sad day when that happens.

A superintendent of the Garda Síochána once told me that the majority of our social problems were in built-up housing estates where there were too many houses. This is also the fault of bad planning. He said people were being driven from rural areas to built-up urban areas and housing estates, which was causing many of these problems. This is an issue that needs to be addressed. I hope the Green Party and its members will not continue with this flawed idea. These estates are similar to reservations. They want to herd people into built-up areas, but they are creating ghettos.

See this speech in context