Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I begin by acknowledging the resignation of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, as leader of the Green Party. I wish Eamon and his family well on this momentous personal decision. I also wish Eamon’s colleagues in the Green Party well. I acknowledge his immense contribution to public service and environmentalism.

Without a functioning planning system, we have no hope of achieving our climate targets or housing targets. The Planning and Development Bill, which was heralded by the Government as the solution to chaos in the planning system, is, in its current form, incapable of resolving those problems and there is ample evidence that it will make matters worse. I know the Taoiseach and the Minister, Deputy O’Brien, want to reform the planning system. That is why I am confounded by the almost total opposition to any critique of the planning Bill, whether from the Opposition, environmentalists or the construction industry. Instead, the approach is to ram the Bill through, guillotining debate, offering just days to consider hundreds of amendments and relying on unspecified legal advice where legitimate concerns are raised.

In the Irish Examiner yesterday, Attracta Uí Bhroin of the Environmental Law Ireland group recalled the housing Minister’s commitment just in April that the planning Bill would be enacted before the summer recess “come hell or high water”. Many of us would venture that the Bill, if passed in its current form, would bring about a sort of planning hell and a flood of delays. Even though the Bill is being delayed beyond the summer, despite what the Minister said, we saw debate guillotined last week, with many amendments not reached, including my own, and it seems it will be passing through the Seanad with similar undue haste.

The Taoiseach is likely to say in response that we in opposition are always calling for faster delivery of homes and this Bill is one way to ensure that. It is true that we want to see action, we want to see delivery and we want to see the homes that our communities need being built. However, this legislation, far from facilitating more building, in our view, risks taking our beleaguered planning system and damaging it even more.

For example, I have watched the housing Minister - we all have - say time and again that the Bill is compliant with the Aarhus Convention, the international agreement that protects the right to public participation. Most recently, last week, this assertion was made more than 24 hours after the office of the Minister, Deputy Ryan, was warned by the UN's Aarhus Convention compliance committee that this was not the case, and the Bill was not compliant. Nevertheless, the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, proceeded and we saw the guillotine imposed on the debate last week. When that guillotine took effect, numerous outstanding Opposition and indeed Government amendments had not been debated, including my own amendments, as I have said. The Government amendments, unscrutinised, were automatically incorporated into the flawed Bill, and that is really disappointing. We have seen so much work go into this massive Bill, only to see it passed in such a hasty fashion and without the opportunity to scrutinise these legitimate concerns.

Does the Taoiseach accept that the manner in which the Bill was passed through this House was reckless? Will he change tack in its process through the Seanad, and can he clarify whether the Government was on notice of the warning that the Bill was not Aarhus-compliant, when assertions were made to the contrary by the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, last week?

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