Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Rural planning issues have been around for quite a long time. I was first elected to Leitrim County Council in 2004 and An Taisce was something people talked about a lot at meetings in regard to objecting to planning and so on. However, in recent years we have not heard as much about it.

The problems we have in many of these situations is the guidelines that are in place are too stringent to allow people to build houses in rural areas. I come from the rural parish of Aughavas. There is no town in the parish. It is just dispersed rural dwellings. The next door parish, Drumreilly, is the same. The one next to that, Gortletteragh, is the same. There is no town, so people do not have a town to live in and therefore they are going to look for planning permission to live in their own community. The problem we have got, in particular in Leitrim and other counties with heavier soil, is with the percolation area. There is a guideline from the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, that if you fail the percolation test, you cannot put in a house. There are already systems in place that are used in many parts of the country that clean the sewage to a stage that is cleaner than bathing water. The water is going to be cleaner than the water it is meeting in the ditch, yet people are banned from building a house.

It is not An Taisce that does that. It is coming from the EPA and the guidelines that are set by Government. I have asked for years for something to be done to resolve that situation. We have whole rural parishes where we see decline, where people are not living in them because they cannot get planning permission. New families are not moving in. What were three- or four-teacher schools are going down to two teachers and will close in a few years' time. Football clubs are amalgamating because we do not have new families coming into the area. It is all because of some daft rule that somebody put in place which can be overcome by technology. The technology is there and the people who want to build the houses have no issue whatsoever, even if it is expensive, to put in a system which will work so they can live in their own rural community, send their children to the school they went to themselves and see their children play for the football club they played for. All of us here understand that, yet because of a rule put in by Government they are denied this in certain areas. That is the kind of issue the Government needs to focus on.

In the last couple of days when I saw this Bill coming up, I remembered An Taisce being an issue back in 2004 or 2005, certainly when I was on the council. However, in the past number of years I have not heard much about An Taisce causing objections. I contacted the enforcement officer in planning in County Leitrim and he said I was the first person to talk about An Taisce to him in years. He said that at the moment, An Taisce puts in observations to about 5% of planning applications. In the ten years he has been there, it has not had an objection or sent anything to An Bord Pleanála. I think this is probably an issue from the past and it is certainly taking attention away from the real problem, which is the Government's problem in not delivering proper planning for people in rural areas.

See this speech in context