Michael McCarthy (Labour)

That is exactly the point. The political process is being abused by planning agents. This is wrong.

I have seen applications by such agents, which I am convinced were thrown in over the wall of the planning offices, such was the dreadful condition they were in. The standard of the applications was unprofessional and the requests therein were often unrealistic. This only added to the high refusal rate and took away from the genuine argument that could be made on behalf of nieces, nephews, sons or daughters of land owners.

During the last debate on this issue, the Leader and I spoke on the issue of sterilisation. Let us take a real example of a family with ten members, only four of whom still lived at home. The fourth youngest inherited the farm. His three siblings remained but it was difficult to predict what they might want to do in the future. The inheritor was granted planning permission to build a house for himself on the land. He was asked to sterilise the rest of the land holding, which he could not do. I made the case to the director of services on his behalf as to why he could not sterilise the holding.

Thankfully, in that case, the sterilisation stipulation was dropped. However, there are plenty of other cases I have dealt with where sterilisation was the only option available if the applicant was to secure planning permission. This meant that applicants could only hope that circumstances did not arise in the future where the sterilisation would cause them grave difficulties. For example, they could need to dispose of a site to fund health care for an ill family member or to pay for overseas third level education. Such disposal would be prohibited by the sterilisation order. In such circumstances, people are turned into landlords on their own land. They could not use their most immediate and valuable asset to fund health care or education for their families.

There are often socio-economic or social reasons for applying for planning permission. In this regard, I welcome the section of the Minister's guidelines that allows an individual to support his or her application by stating that it is made on health grounds. In the past, planners examined the skyline, the house, the design and so on, but never considered the reason the application was submitted in the first instance. Now that reason can be considered and that is an important development. We have all met people who have been desperate to get planning permission for reasons of ill health.