Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In the limited time we have available, I have to be straight with the Minister. We cannot and will not support the Bill, which should come as no surprise to the Minister. Our colleague, the Labour Party's housing spokesperson, Senator Moynihan, made the party's position on this Bill very clear. She did so both in the Seanad and in correspondence with the Minister. We are opposed to the thrust of the Bill and the way in which it has been developed and presented to us today for a number of reasons.

The Bill originally started out as an intention to appoint an interim and deputy chair to An Bord Pleanála. It now turns out to be what we might describe as an eye-watering power grab by the Minister and Department. The board is in bad need of reform - there is consensus about that - but this is not the kind of reform that An Bord Pleanála needs and is certainly not the right place to start.

One of the Christmas staples is the screening of "Back to the Future". In one fell swoop, the Minister's plans are taking us back to the future, as referenced by Mick Clifford in the Irish Examinerthis week. It is back to the future without the craic and entertainment because this is deadly serious. The Minister is travelling back in time to an era in the 1970s when An Bord Pleanála was a statutory independent board but only nominally so because, in effect, it was a creature of the Minister of the day. Ministers appointed the entire board until Dick Spring's reforms in 1983. He reformed the way in which An Bord Pleanála operated for a variety of reasons. He changed the appointment processes to include panels of experts and so on in order to help make An Bord Pleanála independent of the Department. He did so at a time when the Irish people were genuinely and legitimately concerned about the direction of planning and development in this country. He did so to restore confidence in a system that to an extent had lost any claim to be independent and impartial, arising from some high-profile cases at the time. In 2022, legitimate questions are being asked about the way in which the board is being run and the Minister's answer is simply to go back to the old and discredited way of doing business.

This Bill will radically change the way which appointments are made for ordinary members of the board and that is our primary concern. The panels and so on used to make appointments may be imperfect but they are capable of reform if the Minister is prepared to consider that approach. However, he is patently not doing so. He is able, at the stroke of a pen, to give himself the sole power to appoint up to 15 ordinary members, narrowly defined in terms of civil and public servants, and to appoint them for up to two years.

My suspicion is that this is no accident. The Minister plans to bring in his planning omnibus Bill next year. It will be the case that under the Bill before us it is very likely that many of the same people charged with developing these important once-a-generation reforms that will ultimately limit democratic oversight of planning will find themselves at some point or another possibly appointed by the Minister as ordinary members of the board, albeit on a temporary and maximum two-year basis, to do the Department's bidding. That could happen as the new system beds in and precedents are set under the new regime.

This is no criticism of the independence of the Civil Service, an independence that is hard earned and a Civil Service in which we all trust. However, the risks are evident. The clear expectation will be that Government policy ought to be adhered to. This will end up, in my view, being a case of "Lanigan's Ball". People will leave the Custom House, go to An Bord Pleanála and head back again. One steps in and one steps out again. There will be a revolving door between the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the Civil Service and An Bord Pleanála. An Bord Pleanála is being brought fully back into the orbit of the Minister and Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to be again a creature of the political system at a time when confidence in the board at a corporate level is on the floor.

I am also seriously concerned about the proposal the Minister is making in respect of changes to the Part 8 system. He is doing so in a bid, as he sees it, to expedite public housing on publicly owned land. I want to express my gratitude to the Minister for the proposals he has developed to allow local authorities to clear the debt they owe on public land they bought at the height of the Celtic tiger. One such local authority is Louth, in my constituency. It is important that the Minister has done that but I do not understand why he feels he needs to change Part 8 so fundamentally. It is a system that has worked very well over the years. I was a councillor for 12 years and it was a section of the planning process that appeared to me to work very well. This provision seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

We need to hear evidence from the Minister about the deficiencies in Part 8 approvals. Where is the problem? Where has Part 8 caused a logjam? We need to see evidence of this. We are evidence-based policymakers and require that evidence before we can take a position on that particular reform.

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