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

I know. Unfortunately, the discussion on the Bill commenced early and therefore, I have not heard the earlier contributions. I will to briefly restate my concerns about the ramming through of this Bill. On Report Stage, we had many amendments which did not get dealt with because the Bill was guillotined. I know the Government will say there were many hours afforded to this Bill on Committee Stage. A lot of concerns and issues, however, have been raised by us in the Opposition. It is undoubtedly similarly the case with the Seanad, although I have not had the opportunity to study all of the amendments, given the timeframe. I do not see the rationale for doing this. It seems to me the Government is leaning on something of a myth about planning bottlenecks to justify a particular view of what we should do in the development area to resolve the housing crisis. This really serves the interests of the developers, however, rather than actually assisting us in dealing with the crisis we face.

A lot of the Government’s narrative and the underpinning rationale behind this Bill is the notion that it is the planning system that is responsible, or significantly contributing to, the housing crisis we face. I fundamentally reject that view. To solve the housing crisis, we do not have to do away with proper public consultation or proper environmental impact assessments. They are not the obstacles to resolving the housing crisis. Indeed, I told Gabriel Makhlouf this at the finance committee today when he referred to and repeated this mantra, as people often do, about planning bottlenecks. The evidence does not actually suggest that. There is a massive excess of planning permissions which are way in excess of the actual commencements of development. The majority of planning applications get approved, but many of them are never acted upon. Speculation in the area of planning permissions is a much bigger problem. The Government always states, and this reflects the mantras of the developers and the people who essentially make money out of development, that the problem is our so-called planning bottleneck, judicial reviews or people objecting and all the rest of it. I just do not accept there is any evidence to back up that assertion, but it is a mantra that reflects the viewpoint of developers.

The danger with all of this is that we are going to undermine the vital importance of having genuine, proper public consultation and environmental impact assessments. As has been alluded to, the consequence of all this, when the Government would say or might hope or assert that it will lessen the likelihood of things ending up in courts, is that it will make it more likely because we will now be dealing with a whole new regime which will be legally challenged and more things, rather than fewer things, will end up in the courts. That is very likely, and certainly people with more expertise in this area than me are asserting precisely that.

We will probably address the amendments about LNG later. It is just really bad practice to bring in these amendments on LNG at the last minute in the Seanad. They should have been introduced earlier. We will discuss this, I presume, in more detail when we get to those particular amendments. We will be voting against this.

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