Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We are speaking in a vacuum because we have no report before us. I welcome the opportunity to make a brief contribution. It is an extraordinary week. Yesterday we had the report on Siteserv discussed here and we saw what went on between the two angels, the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, IBRC, and Mr. O'Brien. In between we had the villains and we heard how they were just allowed to do exactly what they wanted. Here we are looking at An Bord Pleanála a week after the first judge in charge of the planning tribunal was buried. Let us remember what he said on planning in the final report of the Mahon tribunal, The Final Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments:

Given the existence of such rampant public corruption, the obvious question is why it was allowed to continue unabated. The short answer to that question is that it continued because nobody was prepared to do enough to stop it. This is perhaps inevitable when corruption ceases to become an isolated event and becomes so entrenched that it is transformed into an acknowledged way of doing business.

I could quote more but I will not. I have only four minutes. We had the Moriarty tribunal. We had the Office of the Planning Regulator directly arising from that. Then this week we have seen Siteserv and now we are looking at An Bord Pleanála. I will make no comments to prejudice any inquiry. The most serious questions have to be asked here by a Government that allowed a process to continue without analysis, without the institution being able to analyse itself and come back.

Suddenly we have an announcement of 24 staff, I think. It begs the question as to how the board was supposed to function. I am going to ignore the allegations for the moment and leave them to one side and look at processes and procedures. How was it supposed to function if suddenly we can give 24 staff? How was it functioning in terms of conflicts of interest if there was nobody monitoring that? Did we look at what SIPO has told us over and over again, that each Government has ignored? In its 2009 annual report, SIPO recommended the Department of Finance should draft new legislation to be based on best practice for dealing with conflicts of interest. Fast forward every single year. In 2021 the annual report stated that for a number of years, SIPO has called for a comprehensive review of the existing ethics framework, and so on. It was absolutely ignored. Finally the programme for Government 2021 began something but the review has not been seen to date.

Then we have a myth of judicial reviews being the cause of everything, and nobody bothers to read anything. If they read the Planning Regulator's report, he tells us that judicial reviews are a minute part of the problem. Yet we have the myth being perpetuated by many Deputies on all sides that we are in trouble because of judicial reviews. On many occasions judicial review was the only option taken most reluctantly by people on the ground. They have done us a favour in an awful lot of places.

On strategic housing development, which we have abandoned now, thanks be to God, but not really because we have given a number of years to phase it out, I will quote what the chief planner in Galway said.

She highlighted the strain put on the department of planning in Galway, stating that the statistical success of the strategic housing development process is benchmarked against An Bord Pleanála's ability to meet its deadlines, but it hides all the pressure and time required at local level. She said it was a flawed attempt to deliver social housing. We brought this problem upon ourselves, government after government, particularly with strategic housing developments that bypass the local authority.

I will stop there as I think I am out of time.

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