Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak here this evening. There are a few points I would like to make. First of all, I think the Minister is doing a good job. It is a very difficult Department. I think everyone would acknowledge this, including predecessors who have held the position. The Minister has made a good start and I hope he succeeds in all areas that he is seeking to lead out on.

I want to speak about the lack of uniformity in council development plans. I was a county councillor in Clare for 16 years before getting elected to Dáil Éireann. There is a total lack of uniformity in terms of how different counties and jurisdictions classify a local, rural person or a social need. Even the definition of what is a farmer can be different. In some counties, it is enough to have a herd number and to be actively farming, while in others it must make up a majority of the household income. This does not recognise the fact that, in many farm families, one or two people have to go out and work in the PAYE sector or the private environment to supplement income. There is a total lack of uniformity in terms of what policy areas are and there is a lack of uniformity on the definition of ribbon development.

Across the board, I think it would be wonderful to see uniformity brought to all of this. I have often been bemused when I hear people talking about the number of houses that need to be built. If policies were right and the climate was right and development was right, a lot of these houses would not be built on the buck of the Government, so to speak. We would be facilitating people to build one-off rural homes and we would be facilitating developers to build small developments. The Minister has done really good work on developer-led sewerage infrastructure recently. If policy is right, I think a lot of the housing builds itself organically without too much State intervention, so I hope all of that can happen.

I concur with what others have said about developer-led infrastructure. I bought my own home in 2006. At the time, in my small community, there were three housing estates all being finished around the same time. All had show houses and there was a choice. With that, the market was buoyant and people could get a bit of value and could negotiate, but there has been no development there ever since. All developments in 2006 in my area had developer-led sewerage infrastructure. They had what we as local councillors called package treatment plants. The sewage was pumped to a facility in a corner of the site where it was treated. It became a dirty term afterwards. When Irish Water and, indeed, local authorities came into play, they did not want to know about package treatment plants because they were seen as being troublesome. We are nearly 20 years on from that. Infrastructure has moved on light years and I am glad that the Minister made a policy change in that regard in recent weeks.

I have a major concern at the moment. I stood up here in the past month in three different Dáil debates and I flagged that An Coimisiún Pleanála had a huge amount of in-house expertise in planning. Sure, why would it not? It is the supreme authority when it comes to all matters of planning. However, I made the point that it had no in-house expertise whatsoever in the realms of air safety, avionics, radar and all of those things. These are not run-of-the-mill planning matters. Rather, they are really specialised fields. I raised the lack of in-house expertise at An Coimisiún Pleanála with the Minister and the Taoiseach. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, took it another day during questions on promised legislation. The upshot of all of that was around a week and a half after one of my debates here in the Dail, I got a letter from An Coimisiún Pleanála stating that it had hired as an adviser an independent expert on air safety. I am my party's spokesperson on aviation. To my mind, there is only one independent expert on air safety in this country, that is, the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, on D'Olier Street. That is where the buck stops. It is the regulator that sets the safety standards for Ireland. It is not just the planes that take off from Dublin, Shannon, Cork and Knock. Some 90% of flights between America and Europe pass over Irish airspace each day. They pay money to the State, so there is a dividend for the Government, but overall this is about air safety. The IAA is the only authority. However, An Coimisiún Pleanála flatly ignored the Irish Aviation Authority and hired a consultancy company from Britain named Sagentia Aviation. I am sure Sagentia Aviation has much expertise and is a fine company. However, one can easily find a page on the company's website on which it boasts about having helped over 300 wind farm companies get their planning across the line. I do not know, so I am posing the question rather than accusing. Is a company that boasts about this independent enough to be able to advise our State planning authority on matters relating to air safety and wind turbines next door to radars? Is the company qualified to do that? What due diligence did An Coimisiún Pleanála undertake to hire the company? What has it cost the taxpayer? It is a crying sin when we have a whole five-storey building on D'Olier Street with all of the air safety experts. They have been overlooked to hire a consultancy company in Britain. It is not the Minister's fault but someone from An Coimisiún Pleanála has to answer these questions. I have asked this question in the Dáil and I asked it again in the past week with a letter to An Coimisiún Pleanála, written in anger last Saturday night, and I am still awaiting an answer. It is fundamentally wrong to override the State body that is the supreme power when it comes to air safety. The reason I bring this up is because of the debate that has been going on here all day and all last week about wind energy. That is a debate in its own right.

There is a spectrum of views on that issue in this House. The one thing I can tell Members, and I can share those documents with the Minister, is that the Irish Aviation Authority has said that in general it has no problem with wind energy, but it has a major health and air safety concern when planning permission for wind turbines is applied for in close proximity to primary or secondary radar. The pinging signal from the magnetron goes up, pings off an aircraft and positions it on the screen of air traffic controller. The accuracy of that positioning on screen cannot be guaranteed if there is a 180 m turbine blade spinning in close proximity. It is all very technical, but the IAA has raised a big red flag. It is the supreme authority on air safety. It says that it is not safe. What does An Coimisiún Pleanála do? It overrode this and granted planning permission for one wind farm in east Clare. It has now brought in a consultant from Britain. Something is radically wrong here.

During an earlier debate on housing, I mentioned the damage a €20 objection fee can do. It is like throwing a grenade at a planning application. The application could be for a multimillion euro bridge, bypass, hospital wing or whatever. It could be a major housing scheme that would cost millions of euro to develop, but the damage that a €20 objection can do is immense. During that debate, we were goaded by Deputy Ruth Coppinger. What she did not tell anyone was that during the time she was not in the Dáil, she opposed and objected, with a €20 note, to 211 apartments in Clonsilla. She was slagging off different politicians here earlier. It is wrong to deny 211 people a home for a €20 objection fee. It is fundamentally wrong.

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