Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Many additional processes have come into planning but we have not resourced the local authorities with ecologists, hydrologists and all those people who are needed to deal with the information in the reports that are coming in. At the same time, we expect the client to deliver all of these reports but the local authority may not even know how to read them, understand them, or get time to read them. This is a huge problem. We can bring in twice as many more pages of new legislation but if we do not recoil it all back and ask how we are going to deal with this, it will not be resolved. I heard a Deputy talking about back in the mid-2000s when we were building 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 houses per annum with the planning process that was there. In fairness, the planning regulations and the climate action plan, and all of these things have come into being since. As well as that, the developers have left the market and I will come to that again.

If we are doing a local area plan in any town, we need to make sure it is relevant, allows for development, and is not just a desktop exercise where we zone land because we see it is in a nice place. That land might never become available for any reason and there is no due diligence done on the fact that this land, that is now being zoned and will create the core strategy, may never be available. Nobody asks the owner. The owner sometimes does not even know his land is being zoned and that is it. He might have no desire to sell it. He might be farming it. At the same time, we are bringing in the residential loan land tax. We have deferred it for a year. I tell you one thing, if functional farmers have to pay that land tax, we might as well close rural Ireland and stop farming. We could have a situation where we have what is called R2 zoned lands, that is, available land if R1 is used up, and that this land could also be taxed even though you cannot built on it. We have so many, what I would call, stupid little things going on that are creating the barriers and are in no way encouraging anybody to get involved. What I am being told by developers and by people who want to buy a rural house, is that the cost of a planning application is prohibitive at the moment between all the consultants they have to get in to try to justify the reason they need to build a house or a housing scheme. What we have done, in a time of crisis in our housing market, is that we have ground it to a halt.

One thing about the local authorities and the planning process is that they have eight weeks in which to make a decision. They make the decisions on applications within eight weeks and if they do not, the planning permission is given by default. If we are going to sort out An Bord Pleanála, we need to apply the same rule to it. We should give An Bord Pleanála X amount of weeks to make its decision and if it defaults and does not make a decision, the decision should be made automatically. If we do not do that we are only playing around with paperwork and with everything else. We need to have an effective way of doing things. The EU habitats directive also needs to be revisited because it is another burden. While it is something that is there as a generalisation, it is being held up as a stick to stop things going ahead which could otherwise go ahead. We have a lot of work to do on that.

I will concentrate on housing and explain what is happening in my own county. At the moment, two private housing schemes are being built in County Galway, the second largest county in Ireland. There are two. That is all. We are relying on social housing to build the number of houses we need. When I ask why we are not building more houses and why the developers are not building them, I am told the cost of the land is too dear, the cost of planning is enormous, the cost of finance is beyond reason, and the cost of construction has also gone up. Then you have local authorities on top of that requesting cash bonds for anybody who wants to build a housing estate. A cash bond is requested whereas a guarantee bond could be given by an insurance company, which would hold the same legal status. Developers who are trying to build houses, and who have to front-load all of this and wait to see what will happen at the end of it, are just walking away from it. The consequences of this is that we will end up in a situation - I can guarantee it is happening already - where there are foreign direct investment entities in this country which are not in expansion mode for one reason only. They cannot guarantee that additional workers will be able to join them because additional workers need housing and it is not there. They are not looking for social housing. These are people who do not qualify for social housing and need private housing. We are sitting on something and sleepwalking our way through a situation where in another three or four years, we will find the FDI market contracting and investors going to other places around the world where they can get people to work who will be able to find houses for themselves. This is in every kind of job.

I do not know if it is being taken care of in the Bill because I have not read much of it, but I want to refer to the taking-in-charge process. In my constituency, in every town and village in which houses were build over the past 20 years, they used what we call private wastewater treatment plants. Irish Water and the local authority are both running away from them, each saying it is not their issue. We have residents who have bought houses and are paying mortgages, and they have treatment plants which are on the tipping point of breaking down all over the place. We have an environmental time bomb and we know all about this for the past ten years.

The Department knows all about it but is doing nothing about it. It is waiting, silent. When somebody tells you the fish are lying up on their backs in the rivers and you are wondering what has gone wrong, it is that the sewage has seeped into the rivers. That is what is going to happen. We talk about climate action, the environment and biodiversity. This is a typical example.

The other side of the coin is that people in the towns and villages that do not have any treatment plant are trying to build houses and are being told by An Bord Pleanála that no house can be built there until a municipal treatment plant is put in place. The Minister announced about 18 months ago €50 million for treatment plants. We have had no allocation of any money to any treatment plant so far. The €50 million he has allocated will take care of about five or six treatment plants in the country, and we have a list of 30 in Galway to be done. That is the reality of the situation, whether we like it or not, and we seem to be just sitting on that.

The rail network came up earlier. We should have positive discrimination towards areas where we have railway lines and stations and land banks. We have them in Tuam, Gort and various other places. We should be able to talk to CIÉ and build residential houses there in order that the people there have access to public transport when they come out of their houses. It is a very simple thing.

As regards Galway city, we have been talking for about 15 years, maybe 20, about an outer ring road, a city bypass - I do not know how many different names are on it, but that is all it is. We have spent about €30 million on reports, applications to An Bord Pleanála, refusals and whatever else. What is happening in the background, however, is that planning permissions are being refused because there is no direction as to what will happen with that road. If developers decide they want to build houses within any proximity of that route, they are refused. That is leading to chaos in our city. Galway city is the heart of the west of Ireland and the economic driver around which every other place should survive. There is an onus on us all to do something quickly and be truthful with the people as to what will happen with that outer bypass. There are conflicting reports and comments coming from within the Government, including that it would be illegal to build it, that it will happen and that it is in the national development plan. Let us for once and for all get it right.

Thank you for your forbearance, a Cheann Comhairle.

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