Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)

The irony is that the Department and the Minister of State will strenuously insist on every plan based on the NSS complying with these directives. This is grossly illegal.

The Bill seeks to enforce settlement targets under this core strategy. It treats personal decisions about where people want to live, work and rear their families as if they are boxes on a shelf that can be rearranged at the whim of the Department. I think that is wrong because we live in a democracy. It flies in the face of the devolution of powers to local government and everything the Green Party and Fianna Fáil have argued in terms of giving more power to locally elected representatives to order their areas' affairs, subject to the NSS. The provisions of the Bill requires this core strategy to demonstrate compliance with a national spatial strategy that has been democratically unaccountable, demonstrably wrong and, in my view, totally illegal. For this reason, I will be pressing the amendment.

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