Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It also found that Pádraig Flynn had taken €50,000 in corrupt payments, that corrupt payments to 11 Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors were an abuse of the democratic system and that the late Liam Lawlor was hopelessly compromised by payments from developers.

This Bill is meant to be the final piece in the jigsaw of rooting out corruption in our planning processes and in rooting through the legacy of the rule of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at local and national levels. It is worth remembering that the consequences of that era are not simply a long list of corrupt payments to leading members of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael from developers and builders. This is not simply about bribes to politicians to rezone land or to to grant planning permission. This is about the effect of these decisions on the lives of ordinary working class communities across the country. It is a legacy of badly planned housing estates, out-of-town shopping centres and developer driven plans that boost their profits but leave us with chaotic urban environments where there is little thought for the building of communities with decent infrastructure or access to schools, transport or sustainable homes and housing.

The wider legacy was an economy and society where the needs and profit seeking of developers and builders ruled and local communities had little say or control in fundamental decisions that affected their lives and environments. The consequences of the bribery and corruption are wider than the specific developments in respect of which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians were paid. These are the developments and buildings that got planning permission and were built on flood plains or in green fields well away from transport or any other infrastructure. The consequences include those of a wider system that permitted pyrite in homes, ghost estates, two-hour commutes for workers travelling to and from their homes and housing estates in the urban fringes of Dublin with little or no facilities. The boom in house prices forced people to go in those directions.

When I hear that Fianna Fáil wants Bertie Ahern to come back or am listening to a radio interview where his role in the Northern Ireland peace talks is being eulogised, I cannot help wonder when we will examine the real legacy of those decades of rule and misrule. To cite just one example, I think of Neilstown in Clondalkin where people lived and continue to live with the real legacy of those years and the corruption surrounding the building of the Liffey Valley shopping centre. I think of the generations of families that are living with no real town centre. Those communities are living without the services and infrastructure they need.

Will this Bill ensure that these things cannot happen again? Will it root out corruption from the planning process? Does it implement the Mahon tribunal recommendations in the area of planning and development? I do not believe so and I do not believe it will implement the key Mahon tribunal findings.

The Mahon tribunal report called for powers to be transferred to an independent regulator's office. This Bill sets up such an office but it does not divest the Minister of any power. The final decision still rests with the Minister. He may have to report to the Dáil if he rejects the regulator's findings that a development is, for example, in contravention of a national strategy. I personally do not believe that to be a big deal because I do not believe that a Fianna Fáil or a Fine Gael Minister would be shy about doing it if developers said we must get a particular development through. I can envision an argument on a whole range of developments where a Minister would tell the Dáil that it is in the national interest to allow particular developments to go ahead.

We now have a series of amendments to the planning and development Act, the main thrust of which has been the facilitation of the needs and agenda of developers and the building industry and their profit margins. It will not be presented as such, however. It will be and is being presented as a solution to the housing crisis, but the bottom line is that we do whatever developers and builders want us to do to boost their profit margins and encourage then to build. I do not see the requirement for the Minister to explain overruling an independent regulator in any specific case as a guarantee that will ensure there will be no political interference in the planning process.

The Mahon tribunal report recommended that the board of the National Transport Authority, NTA, should be appointed by an independent board and not the Minister. Not so long ago we saw that the decision of who gets to be on the board of the NTA is less than transparent and open. I wish to thank the former Fine Gael Minister, Deputy Lowry, who has wide experience of the workings of tribunals, for enlightening us as to what are considered the qualifications needed for appointments to the board of the NTA when he lobbied the Taoiseach for a position on the board for a friend and political ally who was, and I quote, "easy on the eye". The NTA is a hugely powerful agency that has, at the behest of the Government, been engaged in an ideological war against our semi-State transport companies, with the effect of undermining public transport and carving out services for effective privatisation and the driving down of workers' wages and conditions. We see this graphically in the current Bus Éireann crisis and before that with Dublin Bus. The project to tender out routes and to court private transport companies that are mostly fronts for global multinational interests is presented as being in the best interests of the travelling public when in reality it is clear that this is a neo-liberal agenda being dressed up as the public interest. Some scrutiny and oversight of who gets to be on the board that makes this hugely important decision on bus routes and rail and tram services is essential, but it is completely absent from the Bill.

There is also the recommendation whose omission from the Bill is the elephant in the room. The Mahon tribunal's key finding and recommendation to deal with the past corruption of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael was a requirement that relevant political donations would be identified when a planning application is being made. This is neither mentioned nor acknowledged in the Bill. It is not true, as has been claimed, that we have acted on the key part of the tribunal recommendations. We do not have sufficient transparency in political donations and planning applications. After 15 years of the tribunal sitting and nearly five years after its final report, it is not good enough that we ignore this key finding. I do not accept that, for example, the regulation of lobbying register that came into effect in September 2015 is sufficient or what the Mahon tribunal report envisioned. Nor are any of the other measures which we were told would make planning and local democracy more transparent. What is needed is a clear and unambiguous section that requires developers and builders to disclose any and all political donations to any and all elected officials or politicians when applying for planning permission and that information should be made easily accessible to the general public. The professed reason offered by the Department to exclude such a register, namely, that it would be difficult to establish and verify, is simply not good enough.

I have no illusions that any simple measure can stop corruption in planning and development. The very definition of what we consider to be corrupt has changed over the years. The days of brown envelopes to councillors in a bar on Parnell Square may be gone, as is the bar, and the corruption of our political process may not be so crass or obvious, but it may have morphed into a more subtle and sophisticated form. Now there seems to be no problem with, for example, officials who worked in NAMA one week transferring to a private equity firm or real estate investment trust, REIT, the next. There appears to be no problem with the Minister meeting vulture funds or developers regularly and writing down their wish list for legislation and tax breaks and presenting them as being in the national interest. Brown envelopes are gone but the ultimate losers in both processes are ordinary people caught in a badly planned urban environment and a system that is utterly prone to a housing crisis.

We will seek to table significant amendments to the Bill and will try to implement the spirit of the Mahon tribunal report and the attempt of that tribunal to stop the corruption of the planning process. We will try to stop the over-centralisation of powers that the Bill ignores and will try to bring transparency to both the appointments made to powerful bodies such as the NTA and to the political donations made by those engaged in planning applications. That is the least we can do after spending €159 million and almost 20 years examining the matter. That is the least we can do after the tribunal unveiled corruption at the highest level of the State. The least we can do is acknowledge the real legacy of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the era of Bertie Ahern, Pádraig Flynn and company.

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