Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A Fianna Fáil colleague of mine on Clare County Council, Councillor P.J. Kelly from Lissycasey, has repeatedly made the point about the Flemish decree. The European Union guarantees movement of people, yet in Ireland we still insist on people who apply for permission for a one-off house in a rural area to prove they are from the local area. In the south part of County Clare where I come from, not only do they need to prove they are local but also they need to prove they have an entitlement to live in a certain band of the county that is considered to be under urbanised pressure. That is not in the spirit of European Union law, the Treaty of Rome and all the treaties that guarantee European freedom.

Planning legislation needs to realise that Ireland is like a boat at the moment with one side, the east coast, tipping into the water because it is so laden down with overdevelopment, while on the west coast, towns like Lisdoonvarna are totally hollowed out because people do not live there anymore. The streets of towns in north Clare and west Clare are full of "For Sale" and "To Let" signs because of the exodus of people. Of course, there are ancillary services such as broadband, the rural post office network, local schools etc., but people should be allowed to go home and build in their locality. The Covid pandemic has proved that there is a capacity for people to work from home.

There is a flurry of applications for wind turbines to Clare County Council and local authorities throughout the country. Wind farm developers are rushing to get in ahead of new planning guidelines on wind energy which have been drafted but have yet to be issued to local authorities. It is wrong. They are trying to circumvent new guidelines that would allow for wind energy to co-exist at a reasonable distance back from houses. At the moment wind farms may be located right up alongside other properties to the great dissatisfaction and upset of residents. The new guidelines stipulate that wind farms are only permitted 500 m from houses. That is a reasonable rule and I urge the Minister to introduce those guidelines as soon as possible.

Onshore wind farms are only 40% as efficient as their offshore counterparts. We urgently need to revamp the licensing process, which dates back to the Foreshore Act 1933, to ensure that key infrastructure off Irish shores can get the go ahead.

In the last county development plan for County Clare and throughout the country several public rights of way were struck out because the Government and local authorities fear what happened in the Lissadell House case. In my locality and in many villages throughout Clare and the rest of the west of Ireland, graveyards are sited in the middle of a field. People need to go up through a laneway or a farmer's field to get to them. The people have had that right of way for over a century and nobody can deny them that. We need a mechanism in planning legislation to recognise that and, for once and for all, to codify it in the county development plan.

We have an acute shortage of planning enforcement officers. At one point we had only two in the entire county of Clare, which has a population of 118,000 people. We need that capacity beefed up when planning in the country is being overhauled.

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