Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to get an opportunity speak about a few important matters. I have also been contacted by many people, including friends from Donegal and Mayo, who asked me to ensure the Government gives 100% compensation to these people whose houses are falling down around them. Many of these people do not know where they will be next Christmas night or if they will be with their families. This is going on long enough. I support Deputies Dillon, Calleary, McHugh and Mac Lochlainn, and I am sure the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, has made representations. I add my voice to the request of these people that they get 100% compensation so they can rebuild their houses.

At the same time as the material in question was provided for these houses, material from the same company was taken across the Border to Derry. I am far away from those places but I am told there has been no problem across the Border in Derry. What has gone wrong in Donegal or Mayo, as well as Clare and other places where many people are suffering the same problem?

With regard to this Bill, I ask that the Government does not put any more obstacles in front of a man or woman trying to build their own house and doing the work themselves. They might work on a house after coming home from their job in the evening. There should not be any more obstacles that would impede them from building their own house.

There is another problem. Even when somebody gets planning permission, the banks give mortgage approval for just three months. They might stipulate that 80% of savings must be spent on the house. It is not very easy to get everything to happen within three months but what do they make people do after? They make people apply for the mortgage all over again, leading to another delay. It is absolutely ridiculous. Has the Government any power over the banks with the interest it has in them? It should say something to them about having common sense. If people are approved for a mortgage once, why should they have to get it two or three times? God damn it but it does not make any sense.

Where are the planning guidelines that have been promised for five or six years? I have heard the Minister of State talking about planning even on our local Kerry radio sometimes and there are problems down there. Land is being dezoned in rural towns and villages. Councils want to zone more in bigger towns but developers will buy those sites; meanwhile, the man who wants to buy a site and build a house cannot get planning permission.

There is the other issue of urban-generated pressure. A person might want to buy a site from a neighbour, having lived beside that neighbour all his life. If the territory is in what is known as urban-generated pressure, he would not be allowed to build. If the neighbour on the other side owns the land, or the father owned the land, he could build. These two people might have gone to school together, perhaps in the same car or walking to school together. One can get permission but the other cannot. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Going back a few years, there was a planning case in Belgium. Ms Maura Healy-Rae asked last week in Kerry County Council, by way of a motion, whether the local authority was acting illegally by insisting that people must be from a certain area in order to get planning permission. This happened a good number of years ago. Will the Government do anything about this and are we acting illegally in this country? Belgium is in Europe the same as us.

There is talk of building houses and that so many houses will be built but we have no sewerage system in many of our towns and villages in Kerry, including in Kenmare, Castleisland and Kilcummin. Something will have to be done about objectors because they have people tormented and tortured down through the ground.

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