Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are many reasons we have a housing crisis and we have put forward many of those in motions recently at every opportunity available to us. Planning permissions are a very significant issue, as are sewerage issues, where housing developments are being objected to and where county development plan decisions are taken out of the hands of councillors. All of these decisions are feeding into a very negative situation.

The Minister of State even spoke last week here about the issue of honesty, in that we need honesty about what is contaminating our waters and about sewage. I keep telling the Minister of State about Shannonvale and we have a Deputy in west Cork who has never stopped shouting about it since I brought it up in the Dáil. He wants to cure it all and he was a mayor himself for a year and nothing happened. Since the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, was down in west Cork, the town has gone off the list instead of being on the list. Raw sewage is up in that community field and going into the mains water in Clonakilty, and it is scandalous.

On planning permission, young people are coming to me every week in my constituency, where I have a few clinics, to tell me they have been repeatedly refused planning. Why is that? There are masses of houses being built in some places like above here in Dublin and I do not begrudge anyone having mass development here, but surely be to God it should be the same for the person in rural Ireland as it is in urban Ireland, but it is not. An unfair burden is being put on people in rural Ireland thanks to the Minister of State's Government and to county development plans which are a complete disaster. Now that control has been taken away from the councillors, as mentioned by Deputy Canney, and the councillors, in fairness always fought for these people.

I also fully agree with Deputy Mattie McGrath about the 5% increase in the price of concrete products. This will create a dire situation for young people, in particular, who are trying to build homes. I am pointing the finger very much at the Government but I am also proposing solutions. The Government must wake up to these solutions and work with the local people, the councillors and the Deputies and stop driving Green Party policy, driving people out of rural communities and, at the same time, causing an urban crisis.

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