Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill.

I want to concentrate on planning first and what is really happening in that area. Taking County Galway, we have just passed the county development plan. It has been operating for two weeks. We are being told now, and it is being put out there in the newspapers, that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, will be producing a review of rural housing and the strategy for planning and development in that regard. This creates uncertainty. Coming up to the passing of our county development plan in Galway, the submission of applications for rural housing was undertaken in a frenzy because people were fearful that something would happen in the context of that plan. Now, another rush of applications is going to come because people are afraid of what the Minister will bring in to restrict people building houses in rural areas.

At the same time, we have many growth centres in County Galway, such as Craughwell, Corofin, Abbeyknockmoy, Ardrahan, Laban and others. It should be possible for houses to be built in towns and villages, but we cannot do that because we do not have any wastewater treatment plants. When I say wastewater treatment plants, I mean publicly-owned wastewater treatment plants. In effect, what is happening is that Galway County Council’s planning department and An Bord Pleanála are refusing to allow development in any of these towns and villages if a municipal wastewater treatment plant is not available. They call it "premature development". At the same time, we do not want people to live in the countryside. We are trying to push them into the towns and villages, where they will have services. Equally, people are being pushed into the cities and away from their families. Therefore, we must look at this issue in respect of how we are providing housing and ensuring that people can live, work and raise their families in their own parishes. It is important that we go back to the grassroots on this issue.

Similarly, with zoning, policy decisions that have been made and that are being implemented by the planning regulator are forcing high densities and restricting the amount of land that can be zoned for development. This is creating scarce supply. Additionally, regarding the zoning that is being designated, the land concerned may not be available because the owners may not be able to sell it, perhaps due to the legal title not being right. All these things are done on a desktop, however, so we end up with lands that are zoned as R1 in our towns, cities and counties, but which cannot be built on. Therefore, we are creating an increase in the value of zoned land that is available and, in turn, increasing the price of our houses.

I had an interesting conversation last week with a mother whose daughter is building a house and who must get a water connection from Irish Water. This shows how bad the situation is. The water connection must come from the mains, which is 250 m from the road. Irish Water has estimated a cost of €300 per linear metre, which would add up to a total of €75,000 to get a water supply to the house. We have gone way beyond any kind of real common-sense approach to building houses if that person must pay €75,000 for a water supply, and all because Irish Water has set a national rate for laying pipes and will not allow anyone else to lay pipes along public roads. So be it. In the commercial world, however, that piping could probably be laid for about €5,000 and I would even argue that that might be a bit too dear. We must be realistic here and ask who is paying for what and who is conning whom.

Turning to this Bill, the substitute consent process was flawed when it was initiated. I have seen cases where An Bord Pleanála awarded decisions on substitute consent that stipulated that a development or project was fine up to the date of the said decision, but that it was necessary to go back in again and seek planning permission for future works. Effectively, that closed quarries badly needed for infrastructure. I know of a case involving one quarry that has been in the courts. Every time the quarry makes a move to do something to regularise its position, judicial reviews are brought to the courts. At this stage, that quarry's planning application is not in Heaven or in Purgatory but down in Hell, because neither the county council nor An Bord Pleanála have any legal mechanisms by which they will accept an application for future planning concerning this development. At the same time, several years ago this same quarry was deemed qualified to supply stone to Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, for a major project being undertaken in Galway.

Therefore, something is completely amiss here. There is a mystery as to who is putting in all these objections, who is taking all these judicial reviews and who is going to the courts at such a cost. The Minister and the Government need to examine what is going on in the quarry industry now. If they do not, then we will be closing quarries by stealth and we will end up with few suppliers. There may then be a cartel-type operation. Therefore, I strongly urge the Government to have a look at this issue, because I am not comfortable with what I see going on in respect of the objections going in. There are serial objections and there is no fear that money will not be found to do what the objectors are doing. I would like to see transparency regarding where the money is coming from to put in these objections.

A case in point, and it is mentioned in the briefing notes, is Derrybrien. From day one, that was a sordid mess. It continues to be a mess because we have now lost the capacity to generate green energy. We are going to decommission the 45 wind turbines up there. They are a valuable asset in Galway now and they are going to be decommissioned, which means they will have to be taken down and taken out of there. That is going to create a risk of further landslides and mudslides. We have gone from bad to worse to crazy in what we are doing now. I would like to see legislation enacted to allow the ESB to try to regularise what has been done at Derrybrien and to keep that project live so we can benefit from it. We have paid enough fines on that development and now we have to take the equipment down. It just seems to be completely off-the-wall stuff and our hands are tied because of things we cannot do because of legal matters. I challenge that perspective. It is not the legal matters that are the problem, but the policies we have put in place. The legislation we put in place was not good enough and the transposition of EU law into this country has also been flawed. There is much to be answered for in the area of planning and this kind of crazy stuff has got to stop.

We will have an opportunity to discuss this Bill next week. There are many technicalities in this legislation and many issues that we will have to tease out. I am glad that in the meeting of the Business Committee today the Government acceded to there being an extra hour to debate this Bill and accompanying amendments. Planning has become a burdensome process for our public works. If building to provide hospital beds, a flood relief scheme, a road, a railway or whatever is to be undertaken now, in the normal set of circumstances, the processes we have put in place for ourselves to try to be perfect people in how we do things mean there is now a seven-to-eight-year timeframe from the inception of a project to the date we will be able to go to tender. The Government has announced that it is going to build an accident and emergency hospital department in Galway. The project has been announced, but we must wait eight years before we will see a building contractor on site. Equally, we have to tell people who have been flooded out several times that it will be seven or eight years before we will have a plan in place to allow us to deal with the problem. There is something wrong. Housing is an emergency right now, so we need to be able to do things in an emergency to ensure we can build houses immediately.

I believe the construction industry can build the houses we need. We will have to innovate and change some of the techniques by which we undertake building, but I believe that if the projects get to the contractors, then they will build them. The big stumbling block now, however, is trying to get through these processes. Another bugbear of mine is this issue around the public spending code, PSC. It is another one of these things that was used when we had no money as a reason to delay projects. It should not now be used as an excuse to stop or to delay us building houses, the necessary infrastructure for our health services and works to relieve flooding around the country. Nobody is talking about flooding now because nowhere is flooding.

I can guarantee that when the next flood comes, the people who were flooded five years ago will wonder what happened in the meantime. Someone will say that consultants and hydrologists were brought in to do feasibility reports and whatever else, and that planning permission and appropriate assessments are needed. They will look at the amount of money spent on all of that, yet we have achieved nothing. It is important that there is a common-sense approach to planning.

The Government must take the planning and procurement processes by the scruff of the neck in order to ensure that certain facets of our development can be done on an emergency basis and that, first, housing and, second, health infrastructure - be it hospitals, community nursing homes or whatever - are built. Nobody will thank us in five or six years' time if we get all the paperwork right but have nothing done. The biggest tragedy in housing is that we are not able to move from this great, big inertia that we have put in front of us in terms of getting things done. We have to do it and be brave. We have to do it for a short term in order to get things going again. It is very important that we do it for the people who are hard hit as a result of everything that is going on. If we do not show some initiative, bravery and forward thinking, we will be talking about this in ten years' time and have nothing done.

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