Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was actually so anxious yesterday about this section we are heading into now that I was inclined to leapfrog because I wanted to come to it. It all comes back to what people are going to see from the outside looking in at what exactly is trying to be achieved in this section. It could be private individuals, whether they want to build a house for themselves in an urban or, more troublesome again, perhaps, rural area. It could be a developer who might be classified as a big developer, even though they are getting scarce, or a medium-size developer, who are getting scarce. Gone altogether from us are the small builders, who were respected so much. They were in every town, village and community. Those were the people who might have built one, two or three houses every year. They were terribly important in our communities. They are gone because they have been priced out of the market. There is red tape and bureaucracy in trying to get planning to be able to sell on a house they might build or develop and try to do so at an affordable price. Nothing that is in this will help. All I can see in it is that it is going to make the red tape worse. It is going to make the bureaucracy worse. It is doing nothing to make planning user-friendly.

The message seems to be going out now to our local authorities and planning departments. I have spoken extensively to people not just in County Kerry but in other counties who are involved in implementing the planning rules - the bible. What we are looking at here is the same as holding up holy God's Bible. This will be the planning bible of the future for many years to come. There is no comfort in this for a person who wants to build a home. We still have all the other things. We have the site assessment and the rural settlement policy. There is no relaxation in anything. At the end of the day, we can talk here for an hour or we can talk until 12 o'clock tonight. We can do the same tomorrow night and next Tuesday or Wednesday. At the end of the night when we go home, however, the one thing that will be asked by the person we meet, be it the farmer, small builder or bigger developer, is what we in Dublin are doing for them to make planning permission easier to get in Ireland. The honest answer we will have to give them is absolutely nothing. They will be asking what we are doing about the serial objectors. What is the answer we will be able to give them? Unfortunately, we are doing nothing about that either. We have serial objectors who have seats in Dáil Éireann and who object to thousands of homes being built in their constituencies. I will never get my head around that. I will never be able to understand it. People can give whatever reasons they like but, unfortunately, they are not breaking a law or rule. It is allowed for, but it should not be. We need homes. We need affordable homes. We need them in towns, cities and rural areas.

It is like, for instance, the site assessment, which in my years in politics has got more difficult to achieve. One time, a very straightforward, or what we would now call old-fashioned, septic tank was a perfectly acceptable system. It was not polluting anything. It was not doing any harm to anybody. Now, people have to have a state-of-the-art boiler cycle and they are very lucky if that will pass. Always remember, however, if the green light goes off any day and a red light comes on, it will take a very short length of time for that tank to go septic whereas everybody knows the old septic tank would be there for a long time before it would actually turn septic because of the simple fact it was an easier mechanism to control and it was an easier way of dealing with the wastewater and effluent that came out of a home.

I will again come back to the point that we can go through amendments Nos. 195, 196, 197 and 198 and all of this section, but when we go home or when people who are interested in building a family home ring us tonight when we leave this Chamber and ask what good work we did for them today and how it is going to be easier for them to get planning from Kerry County Council or any other local authority, the answer, unfortunately, we will have to give them is, "No, there is nothing in this for you", or if there is, it is very little and very hard to see. It will actually make getting planning in Ireland more expensive because of all the different changes that are being made and all the different reports that have to come in. The bar is being raised higher and higher. Of course, we have not at all mentioned the fact that the actual building materials are so expensive. If we add that to the cost of getting the piece of paper to grant someone permission, it is going to make it very difficult for any young couple. Is it any wonder then that young couples or young nurses are leaving. Before, we had people like the great O'Flynn from County Cork, who has been building houses for decades now at this stage. His biggest customers at one time were teachers, gardaí and nurses because they had what we would call a reliable income. Now, however, whatever job a person has and whether he or she is a garda, teacher or nurse, the price of buying a house from a developer or building it oneself has actually gone out of control and beyond people's reach. People are questioning themselves then and asking why their lovely young people are leaving here and are not able to stay to work and live here.

How could they given the cost of providing a roof over their heads, which is the most basic requirement that they have? Is it not backwards we are going, because in the 1970s and the 1980s, and maybe even in the early 1990s, those categories of people could afford their own home and now they cannot? They would be on what would be called reliable salaries, but by the time they pay for childcare and everything, it is impossible for them to be able to afford the homes. Is there anything contained in these two booklets that will help those people? Absolutely nothing, and if I am wrong, I would love to see a Government-supporting TD or an Opposition person telling me that I am wrong and that there is good news in it for them, because if there is, I cannot see it.

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