Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Okay, Deputy Ó Cuív wants to play Dublin off against the country. As an urban Deputy I want to see rural Ireland protected and I make the point that in order to do that we do not privatise or bring to bear commercial priorities to services such as public transport. If we do that - we are doing it - bus services and transport infrastructure will be cut to those areas. Post offices will be closed - this has been done. Small schools will close because it is all about the viability, in the narrowest possible terms, of these particular services. The market does not consider it a good idea to subsidise bus services or transport infrastructure or to have post offices that achieve social goals, if they cannot at the same time make money. No matter how good it was, in reality is the plan goes out the window.

Housing is another obvious example of this. The market completely undermines any of the spatial plans. Ireland's recent experience is an obvious example of that. I remember the regional planning guidelines that dictated certain big developments in the Dún Laoghaire area. This included building houses on green spaces because certain population projections for building houses had to be met. Planning permission was given for certain developments but the joke was that these houses were built by the market that had no interest in actually connecting the homes they built to the people who needed the houses. The houses were built and the people could not afford the houses. The value of those units collapsed, the banks collapsed and we still had people who were homeless with nowhere to live. The market stopped building, the banks stopped lending and the people who needed the houses have left the State because there is no work for them as the economy has collapsed. In any event they could not afford the houses that were built. For six or seven years no houses were built, even though we had these beautiful plans and projections about population growth. It was all rendered meaningless because the housing market was completely privatised. The investment decisions and the infrastructure investment that would go with it was, in the end, actually decided by private banks and private developers. The Government continues to put the decision making into their hands, even as we face a housing and homelessness emergency. I do not really see the point in these national framework plans if the Government continues to cede control over land, property and capital more generally into the hands of these entities.

I shall give another example of forestry and Coillte. If Ireland is to tackle the environmental issues facing us - it is one of the big imperatives for the future - then we must do something serious about carbon emissions. Again, commercial imperatives prevent the Government from doing this because it does not want to give over land to forestry, which would be a carbon sink and so on. Ireland pleads to the EU that we do not want to have to meet the targets and that we want special treatment and so on and so forth. Coillte is the body that is supposed to plant forests. In the business pages of The Irish Times this week one will read that Coillte now wants to engage in public private partnerships to use its land to build giant wind farms. The article also says that Coillte then plans to sell them off. This has not been mentioned in the Dáil this week. Coillte is explicit about this.It is going to sell off Coillte estate. We need to control whether we are going to be the ones to decide what happens to land use and what we will do around environmental protection and climate mitigation.

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How can we do that if the body in charge of 7% of the land mass of the State and which is charged with the afforestation of the country plans to sell off massive tracts of land to its public private partners? How can we control or have any influence on the future if that is what we are doing? Those examples can be multiplied across almost every sector of the economy. I believe in planning and in consultation and input but what is the point when all the other plans have come to nothing while the market has dictated our circumstances until now? What is the point if we continue to allow big business and corporations to gain control of more land, infrastructure, services and capital because the Government will not tax them? Wealth is concentrated ever more in their hands while the population is left as a passive bystander to watch what the multinational corporations do to us.

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