Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Is díospóireacht an-tábhachtach í seo agus ba mhaith liom cúpla rud a rá i dtosach. I would first like to praise “RTÉ Investigates” for the fantastic work it has done, particularly even this week, in exposing corruption in public life on our television screens. I was absolutely disgusted to see that houses that were being proposed by a reputable developer on appropriately zoned land were being held up. There was a gun to the head and they had to pay up or the objection went in. I thought that day was long gone but clearly it is not.

We talk about development plans. In 1989, I was a councillor in Drogheda. There was a listed building on our development plan. It was listed as worthy of preservation but it was very kindly demolished in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend by a developer. By the Monday morning it was gone. It was a listed building. Where is the development plan? Where is the law? Where is the council? As it turned out, the only people who did anything about it were the late Eddie O'Doherty and me. There was an order of the court that it could not be demolished without planning permission, so we brought the developers who knocked down that listed building to the High Court. They were also prosecuted in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for the offences they committed. The company pleaded guilty in the Circuit Court. The person who did the actual demolition received a fine of €10,000. At least we fought to get that building back up again. If the Minister of State goes to Drogheda today - and he is very welcome - he can go up to St. Laurence Street and have a look at Drogheda Grammar School. It is there as it was 250 years ago. It has been rebuilt with handmade bricks in the style and manner in which it was originally constructed. That took a lot of effort. There was a change in the law after that, because they faced a fine of €10,000. As a result of our action, and their action in particular, the fine for breaking that law was increased to €1 million.

Around that time, as we all know because this went to all parts of the House and all political parties, there was the concept of the brown envelope. It is a fact that this happened from some Ministers down to Senators in the Seanad. I am not going to name anybody here because the courts have them all named. One of them, at least, did a jail sentence. The corruption in planning was evident and many people believed it was endemic. People became much more aware and there was much more transparency and accountability. The section 4 motions were ten-a-penny in county councils. In many cases, the councillors decided on a section 4 against the advice of planners about would happen with a particular site. That was done away with. That was a good decision and was right and proper.

I came to form the view, which might not be a popular one in this House, that we politicians should work on the development plan, create the space for the regulations to be made and agree or disagree with the zoning as it is presented to us. However, we have no professional expertise in planning as such. I leave it to the planners. I do not know the percentage of planning applications that are given by councils, and maybe the Minister of State could get it from the councils, which have great power and authority. In a lot of county councils it is somewhere over 90%. It is very high. Therefore, most people who apply for planning actually get it. There are a lot of good things going on. There have been changes in the law. We need more changes and that is what this Bill is about. It is about dealing with delays, what sort of country we would like to have in the future and what greater transparency we can have in our planning process.

One of the issues I would like to raise is the question of the actual development plan. We all know the development plans run to a particular - I think it is five years - cycle.

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