Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his outline. In my five years in the Dáil, this is the fifth year in a row that in the dying days or hours of the December term very complex amending legislation on planning and residential tenancies has been brought before the House. In each of those years the legislation was been brought to the House in an incredibly unconventional and, I believe, unhelpful manner. That is not a comment on whether I support or oppose the provisions of the Bill. Given the complex nature of legislation, the reason we have a legislative system with various Stages is to ensure the opportunity not only for the Minister to outline the intention behind legislation but for Members across the House to scrutinise, hear outside expert opinion, to deliberate and to try, in many cases, to improve the legislation.

The difficulty is that when legislation of this type is rushed, mistakes are made. That is not in any way to question the hard work of the officials, but to question the repeated practice of officials being put under undue pressure and unrealistic timetables to produce legislation to address complex matters. In fact, in my first December in the Oireachtas in 2016 we dealt with legislation on rent pressure zones. The Minister will recall that such was the rushed nature of the legislation, substantial mathematical errors were included in the formula for the rent pressure zones which meant that if the legislation had passed without amendment, there would have been an 8% cap rather than a 4% cap. I am not criticising or questioning any official who works hard and late into the night to draft legislation. It is the timescale in which officials are unfairly required to draft complex matters and the lack of adequate scrutiny by the House that are the problem, as was the case in 2016 and in each year since then. It is again today.

It was a mistake for the Minister not to allow the Oireachtas housing committee to scrutinise the substantive parts of the Bill before us today. I will speak to those in a moment. We had indicated that we wanted to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny, PLS, but the Minister chose to take another route through the committee. We offered a date for PLS in the same week the Minister wrote to us because we understood the need to expedite it quickly. In fact, rather than the Minister taking it through the Seanad and speeding the process up, because he himself has had to introduce substantive amendments not consequent to the Bill, it is now happening in the same timeline as it would have happened if the committee had been allowed to do its job. Pre-legislative scrutiny is important. It is important to adequately scrutinise and strengthen the legislation before us and therefore I think it is disappointing that we were denied that opportunity. I make this point constructively. We want to be able to do our job as legislators to scrutinise, even when we support the intentions of the Bill, so I urge the Minister to please let us do that. We will always facilitate the Minister with speedy meetings when required.

I am most concerned with respect to the substantive amendments not consequential to the Bill, both on substitute consent and the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act. In the briefing we got from the officials the week before last they told us that the Attorney General had indicated that this was one of the most complex areas of law that he has ever dealt with. If it is complex for the Attorney General, then for those of us who are not legal professionals it is inadequate to be given short briefings and insufficient time to scrutinise. The Minister is correct to state that because of the failure of the State to adequately transpose EU environmental directives and ensure adequate public participation in the planning process, it is currently being fined €15,000 a day. The fines to date are somewhere in the region of €10 million. Even if we pass the Bill today and it is signed into law by the President at the weekend, those fines will continue to accumulate until the summer of next year when the board is expected to make its decision on the case in question. This was confirmed to us by officials at the committee meeting on Tuesday of last week. The expected total fine arising from the European Court of Justice, ECJ, case of last autumn will be in excess of €15 million.

I am also concerned that there are some errors in the Bill. As the Minister is aware, there is a number of different pathways into substitute consent and a number of those exceptional circumstances are dealt with, as outlined in previous legislation. There is a real concern that where a case is brought before the board, that exceptional circumstances may not have to be fully considered. I will talk this through in more detail at a later stage with the Minister, but it is specifically related to the amendment to section 177K of the 2000 Act and whether those provisions adequately provide for what the Minister intends to provide in this legislation. At the heart of all of this is the repeated failure of the Government to adequately transpose crucial directives from European law, which protect the environment, and in protecting the environment protect the ecosystem and communities and the livelihoods of people, especially those in rural areas. There is a failure also by the Government to live up to its obligations under the Aarhus Convention to ensure full public participation.

Ironically, there are two other hugely important and complex pieces of legislation going through the Oireachtas. I refer to the water environment (abstractions) Bill and the marine planning and development management Bill. We are getting to have proper pre-legislative scrutiny of the general schemes of those Bills, but many of us on the committee are deeply concerned that the same minimalist approach to implementing and transposing EU environmental directives and public participation is being taken to that legislation as was taken to substitute consent legislation previously. It does not seem to be the case that the Government is learning from the mistakes of the past.

I will briefly deal with what are essentially the four substantive sections of the Bill. The Minister is making a wrong call on the provisions around public meetings in the initial stages of city and county development plans in terms of the permanent nature of this measure. There are people who will never be able to engage in writing or online on the Internet for all the reasons we know and, therefore, including a mandatory requirement for some form of public meeting at the very outset is crucial. I urge the Minister to rethink the post-Covid implications of what he is proposing.

While I have no difficulty whatsoever in extending planning notice periods or the decision-making periods of local authorities because of Covid, the provisions of the Bill are too ambiguous and too wide. My understanding is that the two main concerns are cases where local authorities, due to reductions in staff because of Covid-19, may not be able to meet their statutorily required timelines, as well as future potential lockdowns on a county or regional basis. There are substantial holes in the way in which these propositions have been worked into this legislation. We will try to get through them on Committee Stage.

The concern from this side of the House is not the principle of what the Minister is doing, but is because of the rushed nature of the legislation and the outworking of potential unintended consequences. I refer, for example, to a situation where there is a county lockdown in Meath and the good people of Meath want to engage on a planning matter with the board, and cannot physically travel to Dublin for that purpose, or go to a neighbouring county where such restrictions might apply in the local authority that is responsible for the planning matter at hand.

While the measure on substitute consent is a modest improvement and may just about get the Government over the hurdle of the Supreme Court decision of the summer, it is minimalist. I have tabled an amendment and I urge the Minister to look at the content of the amendment and to consider strengthening the process. We need to do more than the minimum. The community of Derrybrien, for example, has since 2003, if not 1998, when it was first faced with planning applications for wind farms, lived through a nightmare because the planning process is simply not up to scratch. Therefore, we owe it to those people as well as all others who want to engage in the substitute consent process to get this right and ensure that at all levels, environmental directives and public participation requirements are fully adhered to.

With respect to the section of the Bill dealing with the amendment to the residential tenancies provisions, it obviously extends the limited protections to a very small number of renters by a number of months. I have no problem with that. Therefore, I would not oppose the amendments. However, it makes the terms of engaging with that protection more onerous and I think that is a problem. The very fact that fewer than 400 or so people have availed of the protection to date is because the process as outlined in the Bill in the summer is simply too bureaucratic. It is too onerous. The criteria for accessing this protection are simply too narrow. That is why the vast majority of renters, once the ban on level 5 evictions expired, are still at the mercy of potential notices to quit on a whole series of other grounds. The Minister has still not adequately acknowledged or addressed that.

We are not going to be obstructive this evening. We are not going to oppose the legislation, but we are genuinely asking the Minister to consider some of the significant amendments that we have tabled to try to improve the nature of the Bill before us. I also urge him to please rethink the public meetings at the opening stages of the development plan process. It is simply a question of allowing meetings, post-Covid-19, as I think the permanent nature of that amendment is wrong. We will get into the detail on Committee Stage but that is Sinn Féin's outline of the Bill and the amendments as it currently stands.

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