Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)

I welcome this legislation and I welcome the Minister to his position. I saw how steadfast he was against big industry and big business at the time of the gambling Bill. I fought with him on that Bill but he had the resolve to stick with it. I thank him for meeting and engaging with us, and for the briefings.

The Minister has a monumental task. I have said it to him privately and I will say it again. The Custom House has to be dismantled. It was levelled in the War of Independence. I do not mean to hurt anybody but it has to be dismantled to get out the rot that is there. There are some good people in there, do not get me wrong, but there is a rot and a malaise there, and it has to be tackled. Otherwise, we are going nowhere.

We have had seven or eight housing Ministers in the 18 years since I came into the House and they have all failed miserably. There is a situation where they feel they are all-powerful and they know it all, and they will not deal with county councils or anybody else. I ask the Minister to do that because if he does not, he will fail.

I am also asking him, as I said to him privately, to send Mr. Cussen, the planning regulator, out to Donald Trump, or to Gaza, or wherever - he might help someone out there. He created a job for himself. By the way, he came from the Custom House, where he spent a lot of his career. He created this position for himself, and the fools in the Government gave it to him and gave him the power to dezone land all over the country. He undermined every council in the country. Every council worked hard on development plans and he undermined them all by dezoning the land. The Minister is now trying to rezone some of that land again. He created a job for himself and went off on a fantasy tour, power-hungry, power-greedy and accountable to nobody. He has to be stood down. He is not necessary. Give the power to the county councils, which should have it, and give it to An Bord Pleanála.

Here we go again with An Bord Pleanála. There was a lot of corruption in there, as we know. As for changing the name, we have the experience of changing Irish Water to Uisce Éireann, and we did not even get clean water out of it, never mind see any schemes done. Changing the name is a veneer. Tá meas agam i gcónaí ar an nGaeilge. I love the Irish name but to change it to An Coimisiún Pleanála is not going to cut the mustard. It is not going to get out the rot. Its inspectors go down to see one-off houses or some other small developments and give a favourable report where the council has granted planning, and the board, or whoever is on the board - unaccountable, unelected people - just throw it in the bin. That is shameful. No one should get that power.

We had visionaries like T.K. Whitaker, Seán Lemass and others in the past and they brought us a long way. We built houses in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s but then things went wrong, with the big developers, which was crazy, and with the Custom House down there and Ministers unable to tackle it. Ministers were afraid of it and were pushed off and fobbed off by it. I am depending on the Minister to do this.

There are many other issues. Where councils have the powers, they do not use them.

We have a section 160 injunction, a power that local authorities have. With the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's indulgence, we have a situation in Giantsgrave, Clonmel where 200 ordinary decent people met in a hall last Friday night week worried that a halting site was being created under their noses right beside them. Six Clonmel borough district members and the mayor, and two Oireachtas Members, Deputy Murphy and I, met with the senior planner, Mr. Dave Carroll, who was the fire officer and who did not do his job when he was fire officer. He did not visit Dundrum House Hotel. We asked him for 12 months to visit it. He never went near the place. Now he is the planner and he refused point blank for the council to initiate a section 160 injunction to stop this in its tracks. He has that power. He would not use it. He was talking about the courts and that he might lose in the courts. They lost in the courts last week. Thankfully, the good people of Dundrum, the heritage group, took a judicial review and the council had to admit halfway through it. They gave in and put their hands up. They made a mistake in granting a section 5 application to allow a greedy developer to get fatter and more money in his pocket, not on humanitarian grounds. Therefore, the council has the powers and it can us them when it wants to, but changing the name of An Bord Pleanála without tackling the malaise, the rot and the deep rot in the Custom House is wasteful. It might be a pipe dream. It is not going to happen.

Let us count the number of housing Ministers we have had here and see all the unfortunate people who are homeless, still on waiting lists and languishing there and no hope, and see where small builders are being denied the right to build the houses and let them off. Above all, once-off dwellings should be allowed to be carried on. The Minister should not be allowing people in offices in Dublin to throw out good planning permissions and kill the dreams of young couples in rural Ireland.

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