Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am speaking to amendments Nos. 176 and 178 and the amendments to them that I, along with others, tabled. They suggest the national planning framework must be approved democratically by these Houses.

Simply consulting various people, including committees or relevant stakeholders, is not enough. It is saying, "We will let you give your opinions but we will not actually subject the revised national planning framework to a democratic decision by the elected representatives of the people." I would like to hear from the Minister why he thinks the Houses of the Oireachtas should not have a right to make a decision on these frameworks because these frameworks are very important. They set the planning framework for just about everything that is important: for housing, for all kinds of development, for the economy, for climate, for strategic developments of various infrastructure, for water services, waste management, land and sea interactions - everything. This sets the national framework for it. Of course we should consult but ultimately we need a democratic decision.

To my mind, historically, there are two bad ways of doing planning. One is the Stalinist method, which is top down and centralised and we set the plan regardless of what the people in society need or think. Stalinism did not work out too well. It was big plans set by the Kremlin that bore no relation to the actual needs of Russian society. The other type of planning that does not work is where we do not really have planning, we have the market and just let people with money decide what is or is not developed. The alternative to both of those failed approaches is democratic planning - bottom-up planning - where we hear from everybody and everybody has a real say in the decisions at every level of planning the future development of our society. This is what sustainable actually means. Sustainable is not just about certain environmental imperatives. Sustainable is about everybody really having input. This is what the Aarhus Convention is about, which is the absolute imperative of people from the bottom up having a real say and having the right to make decisions about their environment, the society they live in and the development that will affect them. This is why democracy is terribly important. If we do not have that, we are going to have problems because it means either there will be small numbers of people influenced by corporate lobbyists, developers or certain vested interests and who are always vulnerable to the pressures of those things or it is just a centralised, autocratic and dictatorial way of planning, which always ends in tears, with people at the centre, whether a State bureaucracy or a Minister, who think they know better than everybody. I am not saying that is the Minister, of course, but God knows we could have such a Minister.

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