Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)

There is plenty of evidence. There are plenty of people living in houses built on flood plains and in areas without proper transport links. Poor planning decisions arose as a result of land holders going to councillors and demanding rezoning of their land. This is quite apart from those cases where it has been proven that money changed hands. Much of the time it was done on a whim, on the basis of an approach from a landowner. In many cases there were no corrupt payments, rather these were poor planning decisions and the decisions made by planners were overturned. If the Minister is saying that Fine Gael councillors have a clean slate with regard to the particular issues I have raised, then we would need to spend a lot of time teasing out the issue, location by location.

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