Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I want to make a number of points about this Bill. It is regrettable we are now spending Dáil time revisiting this issue, given the amount of time that was spent on the principal Act that is being amended by this Bill. It is a terrible waste of time that we find ourselves back here debating issues again that should really have formed part of the last Bill. I am not entirely sure I accept the notion it could not have been done at that time.

Another point I want to make about this Bill is that it is not legible for ordinary people. I make this point all the time, particularly about amending legislation. There is a body of work in this Bill that cannot be read without reference to the Act we passed last year and without reference to other Acts. Instead of taking a section that is to be amended and restating it in this Bill, as being the proposed new law, which is what we should do and which would be legible for somebody coming to the Bill on its own, we have an amendment to the principal Act, which makes it largely illegible for ordinary people. That is a more general point.

I make two other points on the issues at the heart of housing. The first is about water and I make this comment specifically in the context of my own area of Dún Laoghaire. Generally, south Dublin has a major problem with water capacity and sewerage capacity. It results in a number of issues with water quality in Dublin Bay because when you have a heavy rainfall event, the run-off from roads, streets and footpaths goes into the same system that the sewerage from domestic dwellings goes into. That goes down to a pumping station in the West Pier, which is pumped in an under sea-floor pipe into the Poolbeg station, where it is treated. The problem is that if you have a huge volume of water going in after a lot of rain, the pumping station is rapidly inundated and cannot cope with the capacity. It has an 80,000 l attenuation tank, which takes the overflow but what often happens is that the overflow from the overflow tank ends up in Dublin Bay, where people swim and fish and which is used for recreational purposes. It is unacceptable that we cannot stop that from happening in the 21st century. It is something we need to address as a matter of urgency. There are a number of solutions, which I have set out in this House before, to deal with not just reforming that system but the separation of water and the reuse of water in a domestic context.

I make reference to the proposal that went before Cabinet today to reduce the minimum size for small dwellings. I do not accept that is the solution to our housing problem. I do not accept that making small apartments smaller somehow makes it easier to deliver housing in this country. What you are actually doing is making the living conditions of people in small dwellings - I lived in one for many years - worse and it is not answer. From speaking to people in my constituency, including people involved in the building trade, I understand the problem is getting finance. The pillar banks and the financiers of developments are not giving them the finance they need or are not doing it in a way that allows them to get projects off the ground. That is the problem. If finance is the problem, let us set up a State vehicle to help them do that. The answer is not simply to make changes in the minimum standards to make building more profitable. That cannot be the right answer. Let us solve the finance problem instead of making small apartments smaller, because that is what we are proposing to do.

I make reference to two amendments I put down to this Bill that have, I am sorry to day, been ruled out of order. I think they are relevant because one of them refers to an amendment to section 38 of the Road Traffic Act 1994. That is a provision which allows local authorities to implement road safety measures. Obviously, nobody is opposed to that. The difficulty I have is that it is done without recourse to the elected officials at local level. There are a series of measures in the section. It is a reserved function for the councillors to decide certain things in terms of putting the matter out to public consultation and things like that but the final decision on whether to implement the road changes is made by officials. I am blue in the face from saying in this House and in the Seanad, where I was for the past five years, that officials will never knock on any constituent's door and ask them what they think. That is what councillors do. The hardest working members of our democracy have little power and less and less power because of measures exactly like this Bill that take it away from them and give them to faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats at local level. That is a regressive and regrettable move. We see it happening again in the rejection of the amendment I put down to this Bill.

The other amendment I put down again relates to local authorities and the provision of municipal districts in the four Dublin local authorities, Galway City Council and Cork City Council. As there were not town councils in those local authorities, when the Local Government Reform Act 2014 came into effect, they did not get municipal districts with the result that all decisions have to be made at council level and cannot be made at what are called area committees in those local authorities. It increases the bureaucracy at local level. It increases the work that has to be done in the one council meeting per month. It reduces the efficiency of decisions being made at local level by councillors elected by their local communities. We need to move to empower those people and reflect the fact we should be devolving those decisions to a different committee. At a European level, we talk about subsidiarity all the time and making decisions more and more localised and yet we ignore that principle in the context of Irish law. We are taking powers away from the local level and centralising them into local government. There was an opportunity with those amendments to change that. Unfortunately, that has been rejected.

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