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

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. How do the Irish rich get rich? The answer is property. To a substantial extent, it is through property and property development. What has been one of the major sources of corruption and corruption scandals in this country in recent years? The answer again is property and property development. This is what is at stake when we are talking about the integrity of An Bord Pleanála and the entire planning process. We have a shameful history of corruption in the context of property because people can become very rich very quickly if certain planning decisions are made, or not made. One of the interesting things about one of these allegations - and I will not, of course, prejudice the investigation of these things - against Mr. Hyde is that he had a stake in development land near a site where he was involved in denying planning permission. I do not know if that allegation is true or not, but it is interesting, is it not? It is interesting, of course, because if someone has development land in one place, it could possibly be in his or her interest to not allow a development near it which might undermine that person's ability to make a profit on it. I think this may well explain the slowness in delivering social and affordable housing. Why on earth would private, for-profit developers want to see lots of affordable and social housing that would be cheaper than the very expensive housing they want to build and sell?

To give an example, we have been campaigning for 15 years to get public and affordable housing built on the site at Shanganagh. Not a sod has been turned but private developers are banging up so-called strategic housing developments all over the place. They are making lots and lots of money. They are getting planning permission, and then sometimes not building or building at their own pace when they can maximise their profits. Of course, we remember from the Celtic tiger days that much of the stuff these private developers built turned out to be rubbish. As we are now going to discover with the defective buildings scandal, perhaps 70% or 80% of what was built during the Celtic tiger era was defective in respect of fire regulations. People are now going to carry the can for large amounts of money, while all this building was rubber-stamped through the planning system to create fortunes for those property developers who helped to crash the entire economy.

There is a very important warning in this. The integrity of the An Bord Pleanála planning system should come into very sharp focus when we talk about the dangers of what was done on land by private property developers and a planning system that did not work properly in the context of what may now be done offshore. I say this because there is a gold rush under way in respect of the development of offshore sites for renewable energy production, mostly by private, for-profit companies. One way we could, at least potentially, mitigate the possibility of corrupt and poor planning driven by profit is not to give away our offshore sites for renewable energy production to private, for-profit companies, as we are doing now. That would at least remove some of the incentives for corruption and bad planning. Therefore, a lot is at stake in getting this process right.

I find it interesting, of course, that so many Deputies, particularly on the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael benches, are forever giving out about the fact that ordinary people may object to certain developments and that they might take judicial reviews. I heard Deputy Lahart make the ridiculous suggestion that ten cake sales could be enough to fund the taking of a judicial review. He has obviously never been involved in trying to mount a judicial review. It costs tens of thousands of euro. Communities mostly do not have the wherewithal to mount judicial reviews against what are often awful planning applications, driven purely by profit. Another aspect concerns the planners. One way to ensure the integrity of An Bord Pleanála is to listen to the planners. It is shocking that a group of two people, often appointed from organisations that did not even exist, are making planning decisions where they override professional planners and they are not even required to give a planning reason as to why they have done so. Therefore, we need root-and-branch reform of An Bord Pleanála.

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