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

We have had a pretty wide-ranging discussion on these amendments dealing with the national planning statement. An amendment I have relates to some of the issues that were raised which I think should be included in any of these, whether it is national planning statements or the frameworks. I have consistently tried to table amendments throughout the Bill on the need to promote the provision of social and affordable housing.

Once upon a time, and right up to now, the planning system did not see it as its responsibility to ensure the development that took place in the area of housing would be affordable or social. When we did the development plan for Cherrywood, or the strategic development zone, SDZ, we tried to push a whole series of amendments in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to say there had to be an obligation to deliver a certain proportion of social and affordable housing. We were told at the time that was not a planning issue and we could not do that. I was a young rookie councillor and this was the biggest issue for me. The issue I was hearing about day and day out was that people in our area were waiting decades on the housing list or could not afford the house prices. Then I got elected to the council and one of the first things we were doing was this SDZ for Cherrywood, the biggest residential development happening anywhere in the country, but we were told we could not require an obligation for a higher proportion of this type of housing because it was not a planning issue. Times have moved on and there is a recognition now. We have started to get it. I was also at some of the preliminary meetings when the campaign got under way about Poolbeg. The site there was going to be developed, but the residents were saying that if we were going to develop this, it had to benefit the local community in the form of provision of housing for their sons and daughters.

We have moved on a bit, but in my opinion not enough. It must be hardwired into the planning and development system that it is not good enough just to say we think the population is going to be at a certain level and therefore we need a certain amount of houses which may be built here but not there, and so on. We have to do that, but we must also include in that planning the absolute obligation that what is built is actually going to meet the housing needs of the people in that area based on incomes, affordability and so on. Otherwise, we will end up building loads of stuff nobody can afford. Is that not really what laid the basis for the crash in 2008? We were building loads of stuff, but at a certain point the people who were supposed to live in it could not afford it and the whole thing came tumbling down. That was the absolute opposite of proper planning. We must learn the lessons of that and ensure when we are doing these plans, statements, frameworks and so on, that part of it has to be to deliver social and affordable housing.

In a way, that relates to what Deputy Healy-Rae was saying. I do not know the issues in Kerry half as well as he does, but ultimately it is about the people in the community and whether the planning system serves their legitimate need to be housed in their community. Critical to that is really engaging with the communities, meaning the process must be genuinely democratic. As it happens, we can balance the need to protect nature, biodiversity, water quality and all those things while meeting the needs of people and having a commonsense approach that is also respectful of the environment, which we destroy at our peril. We cannot build stuff and then find we do not have clean water. We have to get things right, but I empathise with the sentiment in that if planning does not really consider the ordinary people and what they need and can afford and so on, then the people who benefit from the plans are often big for-profit developers who just see the plan as an opportunity they can exploit and make money out of. They are not really that bothered about whether it actually meets the needs of the local community. It is just a framework in which they are going to make money.

I am not quite sure why we even need the planning statements. We need a planning system with the various layers, but the specific thing being done here is that the Minister will issue planning statements which potentially will come into conflict with democratically decided development plans or bring other layers of the planning process into conflict with communities and so on. I am not saying there is not a reason for having these things, but it should be democratically decided in this House precisely in order that if there are concerns from Kerry or Dún Laoghaire they can be inputted into the discussion and so the elected representatives of the people have a say over the statement that is made if there needs to be an intervention, if you like, at a national level in the planning system to ensure it delivers the sustainable and necessary development required for our society. We have had the debate, but I do not see why it should be just the Government that ultimately makes this decision. It should be the Houses of the Oireachtas. I repeat that social and affordable housing, the need for it and its delivery should be hardwired into the whole process.

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