John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill and welcome Minister Noonan to the House to listen to our contributions. When my parents moved to a parish called Ballyroan in Rathfarnham, it was the last development before the Dublin Mountains. Tallaght was a village. When we were on a journey down the country, we gave the famous children's catchcry, "Are we there yet?", when we got to Tallaght village, which was very much set in the country.

In the subsequent 50, 55 or 60 years, a huge amount has changed. Much has stayed the same. Much could have been done differently. The area in which I grew up, lived, moved to and serve comprises Templeogue, Greenhills, Knocklyon and Ballycullen. Much of Knocklyon dates from the 1960s. Much of Firhouse did not exist until the 1980s. As I said, Tallaght was a village and there was a mass movement from the city of Dublin. We know the history of that. There were few amenities at the time. South Dublin County Council was established in the mid-1990s and has addressed a huge amount of that, but we still have one of the most disadvantaged and challenging areas in the country in parts of Tallaght.

We now move to the burgeoning suburb of Citywest. I was a member of South Dublin County Council for 17 years. One of my objectives was to preserve the rural character of the roads that led to the mountains. We managed to achieve that. Another goal was to maintain the line beyond which development was not possible, and we managed to maintain that in terms of a 400 m boundary line around the Dublin mountains. I do not know how sustainable that will be into the future. Those 17 years certainly informed me on how I view planning. I have a few comments to make on it. I will go in no particular order and I ask forgiveness for moving from one topic to another.

One of the things the State has failed to do is something I recall addressing in one of my first contributions to the council in 1999. Traditionally, every village and parish in the country was served by a church of some particular denomination and a parish hall. That was the focal point of every community. My local authority has failed miserably to replace those religious and pastoral focal points with a civic space equal to that. We do not have town or village halls. In the 1990s and the 2000s, they were replaced with village or neighbourhood centres. Neighbourhood centres were shops and with some amenity space above them. On the continent, every village and town has a village hall where people can meet. There is not a TD in this area, in particular in Dublin, who will not say that for 20 years there has been a chronic shortage of meeting, performance, artistic and indoor public spaces. We could map geographically what is there.

In my constituency, the churches ceased to exist in the parishes and areas built in the 1970s and 1980s. There may have been a parish church built in the 1990s. There are no churches in the brand new areas in Citywest. I am not calling for churches, but the State has not replaced these central focal points in people's lives with a civic parallel. We have not provided a civic centre, which was traditionally provided by a village centre and was, because of our history, generally dominated by church buildings and institutions. I am not calling for churches to populate all of our newer areas, but, as a State, we need to have a serious debate.

Citywest is a classic example of this. It is a burgeoning suburb, but there is nowhere for people to gather to meet democratically to discuss issues that affect them. There is simply no meeting space because none was designed into the area due to the fact that nobody thought the community would need a focal point around which it could rally, gather and express itself. We put in shops and perhaps the odd crèche. There may be a community centre, which turns into a glorified badminton hall or pilates centre. They are very badly needed, but they tend to be retrospective rather than designed into suburbs. We have an opportunity to re-envisage things. Adamstown is one of the few designed towns in Ireland. That is one of the things I have learned.

South Dublin County Council, after much public consultation and deliberation, formulated an area action plan for the Citywest geographic area. It was designed in 2013 or 2014 and set out where schools, libraries, Garda station, post-primary schools and amenities should be. That was for a classic residential area. The previous Government introduced strategic housing developments, SHDs. Those laws overrode the local area and county development plans and provided for densities never envisaged by the local area plan.

Planning permission was granted by the board or council for developments allowing for something like 100 parking spaces, but residents might have 200 or 250 cars, which are now being parked on major public roads. There are appeals on social media to rent a car parking space in someone's driveway from those who have them. That is how planning has gone in this country. That needs to be addressed. For example, there are planning laws requiring 1.5 or two spaces per residential house. That is fine for a three- or four-bedroom house owned by a couple who plan to have a couple of children. However, when everything is in Dublin is build to rent, a three or four-bedroom house will have three or four adults in it, all of whom have cars. These are small, but really important, issues. Residential areas are clogged because planners did not have the flexibility to take this on board. Parts of the planning system are very messy.

I welcome this groundbreaking Bill. In fairness, Minister O'Brien will be exhausted at the end of this term of government. If one was to judge him on the raft of legislation he has brought in, he has been one of the most dynamic housing Ministers in the history of the State. We cannot judge him exclusively on that.

The Bill is groundbreaking. I used to be a great believer in the Big Bang solution whereby we would try to sort everything out in one go with one Bill or power that the Government could use, but after many years in public life, I have drifted over time more towards incrementalism having seen how difficult it is to produce legislation that will solve a problem.

If we pass the Bill, and I think we will pass it with amendments and so on some time next year, the Minister might adopt an incremental approach and pick some of the most urgent aspects that can be enacted quickly. One of the most pressing aspects relates, for example, to timelines for An Bord Pleanála. When the legislation has been passed with amendments, the Minister and Ministers of State might discuss what are the most important measures in the legislation that we should get moving on now, and I think what those issues are will become obvious as the debate evolves. It is clear the Government is not going to be able to implement in one go all the laws that will emerge from the Bill, so it should prioritise the steps that need to be taken.

In my area, for example, before I was elected in 1999 to the local authority, there was a development plan in 1998. Twenty-five years later, despite that land having been zoned as residential and despite numerous planning applications that, if they had been granted, would have resulted in significantly less dense areas than what is being applied for now, planning applications have failed for huge tracts of that land. Many of them were decent planning applications but that is a matter for the local authority and the board. Twenty-five years later, I do not know who owns the land. Certainly, if you are in business and you applied to have land zoned and intended to develop it, the original owners will not own it any more. I do not know how the State or planners can expect businesspeople to hold on to land for that length of time and not develop it.

We know why we need these laws now. A number of the issues have been outlined by colleagues who have just spoken, not least the fact we need development to accelerate and we need the planning laws to reflect that. Moreover, we need a planning system, as others have said, that is properly resourced. I reiterate, for the benefit of members of the public who might be just coming to this debate, that when the Bill was undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, there was a strong democratic input from the stakeholders that contributed to it. I would like to let my constituents know during that democratic input at pre-legislative scrutiny, when the draft legislation was scrutinised line by line by the housing committee, residents' associations, the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance, architects, Royal Town Planning Institute Ireland and pretty much anybody who has a stake in planning and development in Ireland had a say and will continue to have a say as time moves on. Even at this stage, people have had significant input into this.

What I have seen in respect of planning in my lifetime as a public representative is interesting, and I would be interested in hearing what others have seen as well. I mentioned land having been zoned for 25 years that still has not been built on. I have seen vacant and derelict sites left vacant and derelict, despite the laws we have introduced, in parts of Rathfarnham, Templeogue and Tallaght and no laws seem to be able to make an effective impact on this dereliction. I have seen massive and significant changes in densities over the years. Of course, densities would not matter if a decent public transport system were backing it up. In fact, we could all cope with incredible densities if we were confident the transport system was capable of taking it. Here we are, 30 or 40 years on since metro was first mentioned, and it is still not in the ground. I do not know what it is about this country, what slows down these developments or whether it is something in the planning system. I have seen planning applications by developers and builders for land they did not even own, where people have chanced their arm. I mentioned the granting of crazy planning permissions that took no account of issues such as parking requirements in certain areas.

I am very interested in the judicial review aspect of the legislation. I opposed the programme for Government, as my colleagues will know, on the basis of the impact of strategic housing development legislation on my constituency, where it drove a coach-and-four through local area plans, county development plans and density rules imposed by local authorities, and height restrictions imposed by local authorities. It basically ignored any democratic input and removed the voice that ordinary people, residents and citizens had. We have done some work on that and I welcome what the Minister has done on it, but it led people, residents and community groups who had never previously considered taking judicial reviews to feel they had no option but to do so.

I was criticised recently for making a comment in the Dáil about how all it took to finance a judicial review was ten cake sales. People were on to me saying it was much more expensive than that and that you have to have deep pockets. That reference to ten cake sales, however, was given to me by the representative of a group that has taken multiple judicial reviews, who said that is all it takes. They said judicial reviews are not as expensive as people think, given there are some community groups who feel it is only wealthy areas that can take a judicial review. That was a direct quotation from a lead individual of a group that had mounted judicial reviews, some successful and others unsuccessful, and in my view knew what they were talking about. As we have said in this House, judicial reviews have ended up before judges who might not have any experience in planning law or planning rules making decisions about residential developments. In summary, I like the rules being brought in with respect to judicial reviews.

On the ministerial powers the Bill will change, I can see both sides of this. I can see that national policy may demand a Minister make a decision effecting immediate and real change in the way planning is handled in certain areas. If I were a local authority member, I might baulk at that and ask whether it is not a further diminution and centralisation of power at a time when the OECD and other organisations are saying we have one of the most centralised models of local democracy internationally.

The other side, however, which I can see as a former member of a local authority, is that sometimes local authorities find it hard to make the really difficult decisions, so we have to find some mechanism that will enable local authority members to take the tough decisions and face the electorate, because that is why they lose powers. It is because they will not make decisions and Ministers and Governments decide they are going to make those decisions for them. Over a period of 20 or 30 years, I saw local authorities' powers diminish as a result of their being unwilling or unable to make changes. Our briefing on the Bill states that with these changes, county councillors might find their decisions more scrutinised for alignment with national and regional strategies, and that is good too. Most local authorities do advise their members in the making of a development plan in that regard.

Returning to the judicial review provisions, I think this is going to attract a lot of interest. I have seen organisations or groups in my area take judicial reviews. They might even be residents' associations of which I might not be aware, although I know my area pretty well, that might not have met for ten years. Likewise, there may be other organisations that were set up specifically to mount a judicial review. The changes proposed by the Minister in this regard are to be welcomed. They are worthy and deserving of scrutiny, but an organisation should have to have been in place for a period and to comprise a certain number of members. I would say that if it is a residents' association, those members should have to be local and be residents of that area.

They should be able to demonstrate they have met in the previous year or two years and that they are affiliated with the local authority. I do not want to diminish the right of people to take a judicial review, but as a TD and former councillor, I recognise that the splurge in judicial reviews arose specifically out of SHD legislation. People felt powerless and their only recourse to respond to a planning application was to take a judicial review. That has stalled many developments, certainly in my constituency, which means it has stalled homes and driven up the price of rent and properties for sale in my constituency.

My sole interest in participating in a debate on the new Planning and Development Bill is to make sure that whatever we approve and move forward with will ensure that people who live in my constituency, in Citywest, Templeogue, Knocklyon, Ballycullen, Rathfarnham, Firhouse or Greenhills, have houses that are affordable for the typical couple that used to exist such as a nurse married to a garda or a garda married to a teacher. Homes should be affordable to buy, not only to rent. Everything we do in this new Planning and Development Bill should focus on that. We should be able to deliver homes speedily, efficiently and in a cost-effective way that enables people to live full lives, achieve their potential and live in communities and not just in houses.

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