Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. It is good that there has been a review of the NPF. The previous planning framework was introduced too hastily. It is good that we slow down a little, take stock and review where all of this is going.

I know there is a different term used in government but I welcome the appointment of this "housing tsar", as it is being dubbed in the media. It is important that someone in the Department gives a high-level briefing to the Minister of State and Minister so that decisions can be taken to really move this forward. The judgment will be how many houses have been delivered by the end of this Government's term. It is really important that headway is made. It would be useful for each local authority to present an audit of refusal reasons across a defined period, maybe a two-month period, and that this be brought into the Department by way of analysis. Some refusals are applications that should never have been lodged in the first place, people who did not qualify to build in areas. However, like the last speaker, I can say that in the part of County Clare in which I live, the predominant amount of land is designated as being under urban-generated pressure. It means unless you are born or bred in, or have a social link to, the area, you will never get to build. If we are looking at population increases and urban growth, then what we define as an urban-generated pressure area also needs to change by virtue of that. There cannot be large swathes of a county where pretty much no one gets to build thereafter.

Another thing I have seen creep into our county - and I think it is replicated across the country - is the definition of what constitutes a farmer has changed. In County Clare and perhaps other counties, the majority of a household's income must come from farming. In County Clare, 85% of farm families are suckler farm families. Each year, the cows calve, the calves are sold after nine months when they are weaned and the cycle continues. That is how it has gone for generations. County Clare is not dairy country so it is hard to find a family where the majority of the household income comes from a farming enterprise. It is quite different when someone is dairying; the farm is generating enough income that the entire family can work at that enterprise. It may not always be like that because it fluctuates, but the trend in suckler in recent years has been that one or two adults in the household have to work during the day and do foddering and all the other jobs in the evening. The metric by which "farmer" is defined does not work anymore and can be rather punitive. Someone with 28, 30 or 35 suckler cows needs to be able to live on their farm. They have a social need to be there. To crudely assess their social need on the basis of their income filed with Revenue in the past year does not cut it.

The Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, and the Minister, Deputy Browne, need to keep a close eye on the pilot sewerage schemes. A package of schemes to the tune of €50 million was announced about a year and a half ago. None of them have progressed so far.

I want to say on the record something that concerns me greatly. Irish Water at a high level has been briefing against the scheme. This is a wonderful scheme that needs to happen. There are many villages in our county and country unsewered. When you flush a toilet, it percolates somewhere into a drain and ends up in a local stream, river or lake. That has to stop. Broadford and Cooraclare are two villages in my county that were selected for this pilot scheme. I have overheard senior officials in my company say it does not make economic sense to do that. They use the example of Broadford, which has approximately 100 houses that would benefit from the sewerage scheme. The cost of the scheme is €5 million and they crudely said that works out at roughly €50,000 per house to connect to sewerage and is economically unviable. That does not factor in the environmental damage that non-action involves. We will have to deliver these schemes. They have waited 40-plus years for them. Government has funded and approved them. It is time someone in the Department drove on and overrode these illogical arguments being put forward by way of resistance from Irish Water.

Population targets cannot become caps. Also, in a county like Clare, where much of our road network is constituted of regional and national routes in the west of the county, we cannot prohibit people who have always lived there intergenerationally from building in those areas.

When we talk about planning, we do not talk so much about forward planning as about applications that go in for an eight-week period and result in a decision. We need to significantly beef up in all local authorities the number of people working in planning enforcement and pre-planning. There was a time when you would apply for a pre-planning meeting and a few weeks later would be called in and given a pretty good indication of whether it was a runner. That does not seem to happen anymore.

Planning guidelines on wind energy are grossly outdated. I think they date back to 2008. They are not purposeful for the industry and they are not fit for purpose in terms of protecting the communities these colossal pieces of infrastructure go into. We heard time and again through the lifetime of the last Government that the guidelines were coming. I heard at one point they made their way onto the desk of the then Minister, Eamon Ryan. He had concerns about the noise output of turbines. Fine, but where are they? When will we see the new guidelines? The industry is demanding them, as are the communities where planning applications have been lodged. We need detail. Will the Minister of State come to that in his response?

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