Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein)

The local authorities concerned were Dublin City Council, Carlow County Council, Galway County Council, Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Meath County Council and Donegal County Council. All these councils, bar Donegal, are controlled by the parties in government. Many communities in these local authority areas and others have been victims of bad planning and they deserve to have the causes of bad planning dealt with in a public fashion.

We need to restore confidence in politics and reform local government. It must involve reform of the planning process and we need to move forward from where we are. Local authority reform over the past 20 to 30 years has been used as an excuse to undermine local authorities. Democracy has been eroded with increasing powers residing with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, and unelected city and county managers and their officials, who remain unaccountable. I look forward to changes in that area.

Some of the worst decisions regarding the standards of developments were made once a certain amount of power was taken from local authorities. We should consider the disaster of what happened with self-regulation over building standards, leading to disasters such as Priory Hall and hundreds of others throughout the country. We have a legacy of 18,000 empty houses and more than 2,000 unfinished housing developments. I welcome the progress made on finishing some of those estates. The Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, is in the House. I hope she continues the good work commenced by the former Minister of State, Deputy Penrose.

When the report of the Mahon tribunal was published, Sinn Féin put on record our view that political corruption did not start or finish with Mahon. The attempt by the Government to bury the inquiries into planning irregularities is further evidence of this and is the wrong way to go. We propose to reform the planning process. This reform must be radical and solution-based. Good planning makes all the difference for community and family life. Responsible ethical and sustainable planning underpinned by equality considerations is the right of all. Property developers must never again be allowed to build new housing developments without taking into account the need for the provision of basic facilities and amenities. Developments must be economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. To thrive and be sustainable all communities require physical and social infrastructure. Sinn Féin has developed sustainable community criteria based on meeting the economic and social needs of communities. All planning decisions must meet these criteria before earning the support of local authorities. These include a sufficient supply of social and affordable housing, safe water supply, adequate sewerage, access to public transport, employment, health care, child-care centres and schools. They also include reasonable access to local amenities, such as shopping, public areas, recreational facilities, social centres and cultural amenities.

I raised the proposed reform of local government on the Order of Business today. I suspect the Minister has gone a long way down the process of local government reform and local authority members are only now being consulted. I say this in a constructive way. Many have yet to be consulted. I checked this afternoon and found some town clerks who did not yet know about this even though it is supposed to be returned by Friday. I appeal to the Minister to give them an additional week. Local authority members of all parties, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and others take their job seriously and we should give them at least ten days to get those questionnaires back. The views of those people who work on the ground are very important regardless of the parties they represent. It is important that they have some input into the shape of local government in coming years. If the Government wants to break the legacy of the past, it requires serious reform of local government with power devolved, decisions that are transparent and local authorities that are accountable. I hope we can move forward with that.

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