Seán Kenny (Dublin North East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. Before I was re-elected to the Dáil in February 2011, I was a Dublin City councillor for more than 30 years. Much of what went on in the Dublin councils in the 1980s and 1990s, which was later reported on by the Mahon tribunal, was caused by greed, corruption and unregulated lobbying that lead to unsafe planning decisions.

I spoke in the first Dáil debate on the Mahon report when it was published. The report was of special interest to me, as the Baldoyle, Cloghran and Drumnigh Mahon report modules referred to the 1993 rezonings which took place in the Dublin North-East constituency where Judge Mahon found that corrupt payments were made to some councillors. In March 2012, I called on the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider these findings of the Mahon tribunal. In Chapter 9, the tribunal has found that Mr. Frank Dunlop paid six councillors, named in the Mahon Report, sums of the equivalent of £1,000 each for their support for the 1993 Baldoyle lands rezoning motions. Another councillor received a payment of £1,000 from Mr. Dunlop at that time, which the councillor told the Mahon tribunal was a donation to his January 1993 Senate election campaign after he lost his Dáil seat. This was the period when the dual mandate was allowed for Dáil Deputies.

All of this greed, corruption and unregulated lobbying led to unsafe planning decisions that triggered the property bubble a decade later. In my Dublin North-East constituency, the estates built on the rezoned Baldoyle racecourse lands were left unfinished and are only now being completed thanks to initiatives taken by the Government and Fingal County Council.

In nearby Donaghmede, the death trap apartment complex of Priory Hall built by cowboy builder Tom McFeely was the worst planning disaster of the Celtic tiger property boom. The property boom unfortunately attracted cowboys like McFeely. I do not think any of the Sinn Féin speakers in this debate have referred to the Tom McFeely and Priory Hall saga so far but I stand to be corrected on that. I always held the view that Priory Hall should be demolished and I welcome the fact that Dublin City Council has now commenced rebuilding Priory Hall with Government funding provided to Dublin City Council. I thought of the comparison with Priory Hall when it was reported recently that six houses in the Millfield Manor estate in Newbridge, County Kildare, were completely gutted by a fire.

Many new homes in north Dublin built during the Celtic tiger era were infected with pyrite. Homeowners struggling with mortgage payments and negative equity did not need the pyrite problem on top of that. This Government, through the setting up of the pyrite resolution board, put a mechanism in place to deal with this planning failure and I am glad that homes in Clongriffin in Donaghmede and the Coast estate in Baldoyle had their pyrite issues dealt with to their satisfaction. There are still homes in Belmayne in Balgriffin where a solution to the pyrite problem has not been found. The difficulty in Belmayne arises because of a decision by the insurance company involved not to cover the cost incurred by the home owners, who have to engage qualified professionals to prove the presence of pyrite in their homes in the first place. The cost of this can mount up to €3,000. As I said already, the insurance company, very unfairly in my view, will not reimburse the homeowners for this additional cost for which they are painfully out of pocket.

Many of these planning, building control and compliance failures happened because of the laissez-faire, light-touch regulation regimes that were then in place. These have now have been reformed and strengthened by this Government and I am glad that I was part of that reform. In June 2012 I welcomed the legislation on lobbying that was introduced at that time and I said then that this Government was keen to create more transparency over Government decision making, and to that effect was enacting legislation dealing with the issue. For the first time the public would be able to view information on the contacts that are made between lobbyists and the Government. This is critically important and it needs to be highlighted that these are moves to legislate on the basis of the recommendations of the Mahon tribunal report for far greater transparency over the role of lobbyists.

In the planning and development (No. 2) Bill, which is currently being drafted for consideration by this House, the core function of the new regulator will relate to the evaluation and assessment of local plans and regional strategies, including land rezonings, and will involve making recommendations to the Minister on these matters. Where the Minister agrees with the recommendations of the regulator, the Minister will issue appropriate directions and instructions to the relevant local authority on the steps that should be taken in regard to the revision of the relevant plan or strategy.

The Mahon tribunal report focused on events in Dublin but we must not forget that there are concerns regarding planning decisions in the rest of the country. That is why independent consultants, MacCabe Durney Barnes have been appointed on a statutory basis to conduct a review of the application of planning practices and procedures in six of the seven local authorities, Carlow, Cork, Galway and Meath County Councils as well as the Dublin councils. The Minister intends that the review being undertaken by MacCabe Durney Barnes will take precedence over his Department's own review and he will carefully consider and implement any further recommendations that emerge from this independent review.

I regard the Mahon tribunal report as a fundamental point of departure from the inadequate standards of the past and a beginning of a new approach to planning in this country. The Government is determined to continue to act on the findings and planning recommendations of the Mahon tribunal report and to ensure that our planning system is never again allowed to be exploited as it was in the past. Instead, our planning system will be redesigned and operated properly to ensure that it is a properly functioning, effective, responsive, transparent and publicly accountable planning system.

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