Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on what will probably be the most important legislation to come through this House regarding the future of this country and houses, homes and where we are going. There are a number of issues about which I want to talk. I start off by saying that the pre-planning process has to be given the importance it needs. I see it in my own county in Galway where a pre-planning process was abandoned for a while. We ended up with planning applications going in without having the benefit of a pre-planning process, issues arising during the planning process, and then planners not being able to engage with the agents on behalf of the clients to try to sort out the issues that were there. The reason we do not have a proper pre-planning process is because the local authorities do not have the resources. I will continue to say that unless we resource our local authorities properly, we will not be able to deal with the plethora of issues that arise within a planning system.

We have a situation in County Galway where, under the county development plan, we have arranged to allow for clusters of up to five houses in villages. However, the planners do not have any guidelines by which they will actually adjudicate on these. So far, five applications have gone in and five were refused because there was a divergence of opinions as to what was right or wrong with these little clusters. I tell you something, five houses in a small place like Tynagh or Ballinderreen in Galway is worth 50 houses in Tuam or 500 houses in Dublin or Galway city. What it means is that we keep the local school with the teacher in place and keep the local GAA club right. However, we cannot even get that right. It is a great idea but there are no resources to deal with it.

The other issue which is a source of concern is when we are doing our local area plans, we have what we call the core strategy. I do not know what a core strategy is all about other than I can see from a construction background that we are actually limiting the amount of land we can zone in a local area plan. Therefore, we are keeping the price of the development land and of the house high and keeping it unaffordable, the net result being that no houses are being built.

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