Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)

I would like to acknowledge the presence in the Public Gallery of my good friends, Paul Lenihan and Richie Herlihy. I invite the Ceann Comhairle to Cork to dine at Richie's restaurant, which is a food truck. He has the best battered sausage in Cork. I know for a fact that you too can have a body like this.

I welcome the report but I feel there are lots of holes in it. In fact the entire planning framework itself has difficulties from top to bottom. I heard Members from the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael benches saying that it is now up to the local authorities to implement these plans that are being put together, but it is not. The Government has restricted the powers of the local authorities continuously, year after year. Irish Water is now dictating what can be done. The National Transport Authority, NTA, is dictating what can be done. BusConnects is dictating what can be achieved in our cities. From Ballyviniter down to Carrignavar and over to Grenagh, we do not have orbital buses. You cannot get an orbital bus in Mallow at the moment. We have not built the Mallow distributor road. How can we talk about counterbalanced cities? Bear in mind that Cork was only mentioned 94 times in this report, which is meant to be the counterbalance to the capital city, Dublin. There is a counterbalance problem in Cork, full stop. The north side is deprived of a northern distributor road, of a northern ring road, of a Mallow distributor road, and a Cork to Limerick motorway. How can we really start developing the southern city as a capital until we have these in place?

I put it to the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, that Irish Water is dictating continuously. Only 200 houses can be built in my home parish in Blarney because Irish Water is refusing to put a water treatment plant there. We cannot build one house in Carrignavar for the next five to ten years because we have no water treatment plant. We have a ghost estate there that cannot be redeveloped because we cannot get water to the estate. We have people with land all over Cork who want to put individual houses there for their children. This would take them out of the housing market so they would not be competing against some couples who do not have that opportunity. Yet we are not doing anything on that.

See this speech in context