Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House and wish him well in a difficult and challenging portfolio. I am sure he will give it his best effort as he did in his previous responsibilities.

It is important to note that the issues we are debating today touch on everyone, including city and country, town and community. It is a bit like neutrality in the Minister's last portfolio. No one has ever given the matter real thought. In an ideal world, An Taisce would have an important role to play and in an ideal world it would be important to monitor what is being done in the development area. We should remember two facts. Some 150 years ago, Ireland had double the population it has today. It is worth remembering this in terms of people asking where should they build. More important, the Netherlands is about the size of Munster and has three times our population, yet no one could describe it as a crowded space.

We need to stop the urban sprawl and take a proper approach to people who wish to live in the countryside and build in their local area. We should get the issue of one-off housing properly determined in a way that will suit everyone. That will mean taking difficult decisions and saying to farmers who pretend they are looking for planning permission for their son who wants to sell a site for extraordinary money that this is not acceptable. We must impose conditions on planning applications which will be of help.

I agree with many of the points made by Senator MacSharry. I would ask the Minister to do the following. Without changing the right of appeal, the Minister should shorten the timeframe, even though I know people will object to this. This morning we discussed the Personal Injuries Assessment Board. We have had to shorten the timeframe to ensure people can get their claims dealt with adequately and quickly. The point made by Senator MacSharry is crucial. If things are postponed at the last minute, business plans and house plans go out the window and everyone suffers. I saw a report recently on RTE television about a house which was built in the middle of a planning controversy. At the end of the report, the RTE reporter more or less invited everyone in the world to object to the proposal to seek retention of the building just because it belonged to a Minister. This was feeding into a particular attitude, whether it is right or wrong.

I love the Burren and Ballyvaughan. I supported strongly here, against much opposition, the proposed Burren interpretative centre, which was never built. That is a loss to the Burren and west Clare. I took the same view on Ionad Oidhreacht in Corca Dhuibhne. These issues are important in order to give a focus to an area as long as they are done properly and with taste. There is an arts college and Italian school and restaurant in Ballyvaughan. I have visited the very nice vegetarian restaurant because I love Ballyvaughan and that part of the country. It had a problem with planning and applied for retention. After going through the process, retention was granted by the council. the decision was appealed to An Bord Pleanála and has just been rejected. I am trying to put this matter in context. The appeal was made by a competitor. There is something wrong in this case because it has nothing to do with planning. I am not making a case for or against this project; I am just pointing out that this is where things go wrong.

People who do not live in an area should not have the same rights as people who do. Many people on the east coast of Ireland like to preserve the west coast as a place they can visit occasionally. They want to keep it as it is and make us a major zoo, which they can visit from time to time and remember Ireland as it was while they go back to the comfort of the suburbs in Dublin. Much of this goes on and should not be allowed to happen. We should clamp down on bad planning where it occurs. We should encourage councils to implement the kind of proposals the Minister's party spoke about in regard to one-off housing. I do not know what is being done about this. The Minister made a good speech on three occasions but I do not see how it is working out. This is not just an issue in country and west coast areas. I live in north County Dublin in the middle of a farming community. The man next door to me who owns a couple of hundred acres wants his son to build on the farm but he cannot get planning permission. This is happening everywhere.

This policy needs to be examined carefully. I ask the Minister to introduce consolidating legislation to shorten the time allowed to lodge an appeal. If people lodge an appeal, which will potentially cost a business person or a council huge amounts of money, they should be required to do so in a much shorter time so that people know what is happening. There is the example of the disaster of Carrickmines. I have a stronger conservation and environmental record than many people who wear green wellies and tweed jackets. However, we must be practical. I asked qualified archaeologist friends of mine about Carrickmines and they all came up with the same answer. They said we have learned all we could from Carrickmines; there is no longer anything much to be preserved there. I am aware this is heresy to others, but my friends said they have learned everything from the site; this is also what happens in other countries. Certain buildings and edifices must be retained. My friends said that the Carrickmines site should be used for learning purposes, but after that it has no further function. We need to take difficult decisions and be prepared to justify them. It is not fair to criticise An Taisce if we are not prepared to support it when it takes decisions that may be slightly unpopular. It is right as often as it is wrong. We must examine what is happening in regard to local authority decisions.

Senator MacSharry made a valid point about the connection between a local person and a non-local person. There was a whole spate of planning proposals in County Kerry to change the county development plan and none of the proposals came from the area. We introduced legislation some years ago to stop this happening. People try to do deals which we all know about. Dare I mention the Minister's county, which has been in the news recently?

We must examine how planning permissions are granted. We talk about building a crescent or group of houses, rather than single houses. It will work if people are given a bit of space in a field, so they live in a cluster rather than in one house.

Where I live in north County Dublin, everybody drives into the city to work. There are accountants and architects who do not need to travel to the city, but that is where their offices are situated. It is not possible to get permission to build a retail block in an area zoned for agricultural use. There is nothing wrong with zoning an area for a cluster of houses and possibly two offices, along with a farm produce shop or a veterinary or doctor's surgery. We can build amenities so there are living communities and not just areas which are dead during the day. The planners will not agree with me.

Much needs to be done, but it requires someone to take a hard look at the situation, make difficult decisions and ensure those decisions are implemented. That means standing up to people on every side of the argument. It is an unpopular role, but the Minister can be thorny and he is capable of taking on people from both sides of the argument. He did not take on the job to be a populist, he took it on in order to do it well.

Road and rail connections also need to be developed. With regard to rail connections, we should not be swayed by the arguments of non-visionary people who tell us the population of a place and the likely usage of railways. As the Minister is aware, particularly in his area of Greystones, once the service is provided actual usage far outstrips the prognosis of so-called economists who have said how many would use it. Recently I gave an example of the commuter line between Ennis and Limerick which has quadrupled in terms of usage since it opened last December. This happened without local stations, which will now be built in Newmarket-on-Fergus, Sixmilebridge and Bunratty. I am not even mentioning what would happen if there was a connection to Shannon Airport.

These are the types of planning issues we must consider. By allowing people to move, one can take them off the roads, making the roads safer and making planning better.

Approximately six months ago, Senator Kitt made an impassioned appeal in this House to the then Minister for Transport to ensure the interconnector across Athenry junction was put in place so the Sligo-Limerick line was still viable. He was ignored and it was not put in place. That is how we kill our infrastructure. It then impacts on planning because people will not build a house there. The infrastructure of an area is withered and nobody wants to live there.

This similarly applies to the issue of schools. I often make this argument. People ask why two local schools cannot be amalgamated. The difference between one parish and another is significant in Irish society. We are culturally based on parish and village life. If people are moved to a school with a different patron saint, a different football team and different match day colours, something is lost as well as gained. I am not suggesting we should be governed by this consideration, but there are issues which must be taken into account when planning.

There are deep, cultural issues which bind us together and they should also be part of what informs planning decisions. If people cannot live and work in their own place, then planning is not working. It should not simply create more polluted, sprawling and crowded cities.