Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

All of this local lore and knowledge needs to be reflected in consultation on local planning, as it allows for an holistic approach that reflects the best mix of professional advice, the value people attach to their localities and how they want to see those areas develop.

In the case of many development plans, a wealth of the planning applications and requests for zoning currently before councils relate to NAMA alone. The Minister and the Government have consistently stated that NAMA has nothing to do with developers, but with rescuing banks. The Minister knows this is not the case, since I know him to be an intelligent person. The Fingal development plan process is under way. Fingal is grotesquely overdeveloped. It has a considerable amount of zoned land available for housing units, particularly apartment blocks that no one now wants, and warehousing in the context of the airport. Fingal needs and will have an amount of development, but it will be nowhere near the level being sought by landowners in a bid to increase valuations in light of NAMA.

I am disappointed that the Green Party, which has good credentials and intentions where planning is concerned, seems to have absented itself from the Cabinet discussion on an ongoing abuse, namely, the facilitation of the upward movement of valuations for the NAMA process. I wish the Green Party would take an interest in the matter.

What will be the designated planning functions of the Minister of State, Deputy Ciarán Cuffe? Some people state he will take over the planning side of the Department and that he will effectively be the Minister for planning. Will the Minister confirm whether this will be the case? Will the Minister of State have ministerial responsibility for the oversight of An Bord Pleanála and the other instruments of planning? If so, it is an important issue that deserves to be explained to the public.

My next question is on management companies and unfinished estates. At this very moment, people in every townland are in total misery because of the depredations of rogue developers who have built estates and are running management companies on their own or, for example, with their cousins or spouses. They are charging increasing management fees and are giving no service for them. They are fleecing people who are in negative equity and they are not subject to regulation. I know the Bill contains a clause which concentrates voting rights in management companies with owners as opposed to absentee landlords. However, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform was to have regulated management companies but has not done so. Many individuals in my constituency are now paying more than €2,000 in management fees for apartments while the management fees for houses in traditional estates have galloped from approximately €250 per annum to between €450 and €700. These fees cover the cutting and trimming of shrubs and a few blades of grass in front of rows of houses in tight configurations. People are being robbed and fleeced. Can the Minister give some hope to the tens of thousands of people in managed apartments and estates who are facing serious financial difficulties? Will the Government and his Department continue to allow them to be ripped off? They need to be able to manage their own affairs.

What is the Minister's view of local authorities taking charge of finished estates? Can people in a management company limit the company and have the local authority take the estate into charge? These are important issues, particularly for young families and retired people who are trading down. Both these categories of householders are largely living in managed estates. Local authorities are washing their hands of many of these developments, leaving people with vast difficulties. In some cases only a small percentage of the apartments in a block are occupied, leaving many vacant units. In a block of 20 apartments, four may be occupied by their owners, some may be empty, some retained by the builder with no one knowing what is happening to them and some may be rented to tenants. This is an impossible situation.

I ask the Minister to consider a difficulty which various commentators, such as Jack Fagan in The Irish Times, have written about. The Minister, the Green Party and the planners can tell us that people in Ireland want to live in eight, ten and 15 storey apartment blocks. Green Party planners are very good at doing this. I ask the Minister to consider areas such as Rathmines, Rathgar, parts of the Minister's constituency, Shandon in Phibsborough or the streets of houses built by the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, which were planned and built in the 19th century. Because of the row terraced pattern of building the housing density of those developments is extremely high. Nevertheless these are one, two and three storey houses. Even the tallest Georgian houses are no more than four or five storeys high. They are human in dimension and scale. People have their own hall doors or a manageable situation. Green Party planners in various local authorities want to inflict ten, 12 or 18 storey blocks on people. People do not want them. Nevertheless, in all our towns and cities, planners tell people like me, when yet another planning application for an apartment block is lodged, that they have been given these directions by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

The newly appointed Minister of State, Deputy Ciarán Cuffe, is to look after planning. What will his delegated functions be? I welcome Deputy Cuffe's involvement in planning. The Greens have contributed a lot to planning. I speak as one who has fought this fight for a long time.

People want houses, particularly in our suburbs, where they can bring up their families, where there is a small bit of green grass and where children can play football. We do not want our children imprisoned in a Green Party view of the future filled with tower blocks. We want sustainable houses with which children can identify. I see the Minister shaking his head. He must not have as much contact with green planners as I have in my travels around county councils.

In the past year 167,000 people lost their jobs. Of these, 66,000 are young people under 25 and two thirds of those are male. In Tralee, there are 6,000 unemployed, of whom 1,200 are under 25. Most of these are young men. If the Bill is to work it must promote sustainable development for communities. It must not be development led by Fianna Fáil for their friends in property development and Anglo Irish Bank. We must see an end to crony capitalism in the building industry. That, and the light touch regulation in the Minister's and other Departments, is what has ruined us.

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