Brendan Ryan (Labour)

The Senator is well able to do that.

There was a debate on this matter in the other House on 22 and 23 November last during which members of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, my party, the Green Party, Sinn Féin and the Independents spoke. No Progressive Democrats Member spoke in the debate but they voted against the motion. Not only did they not have this deeply found concern then, they did not bother speaking on it to defend themselves. They just went into the House and voted for an innocuous Government amendment which said nothing about the issue.

This issue has become politically significant for unfortunate Government candidates knocking on doors but something Members of this House and the other House have noticed over the years is the snail's pace at which Fianna Fáil responds to abuses by the building industry. It usually gives it a good four or five years to complete whatever new rip-off it has discovered and then, in a fit of righteous indignation, decides to do something about it. I presume the Progressive Democrats have caught up with it.

The fundamental fact is that the Minister can issue all the well-sounding circulars and reminders to people but local authorities are staffed by people who cannot, without rigidly written down codes of practice, recognise that it is improper to move from a position of senior management in a local authority to senior adviser to a developer. They cannot see that that action of itself undermines both them and the process. How does the Minister believe that people who see the world like that will respond to a circular from a Minister for the environment who does not give them enough money to do the jobs they have to do?

This country is building 60,000 or 70,000 units of accommodation a year. I am glad we are doing that but I wish we could get ourselves organised and recognise that building houses to provide people with shelter is one thing, but building houses to provide people with the easiest capital gain in the Western world, at one of the lowest capital gains tax rates in the Western world, is not necessarily the way to focus on providing housing for people who are otherwise without it.

Investing in housing is one of the most lucrative ways of making easy money in Ireland and to a considerable degree it has been left alone. It is lovely to hear the way the commentators talk about the low levels of rent. The real gain from housing development is capital gain. If one is lucky, one can increase by 15% and pay 20% capital gains tax. Capital gains tax at 20% has its role in areas where we need to encourage investment but it does not necessarily have a role as a blanket levy.

The two issues raised here are inextricably linked. It is about the dubious personal ethics of some people in senior positions in local authorities. I cannot understand the motives of somebody with a commitment to public service who has become aware over a lifetime working in the public service of the capacity of many builders to manipulate, ignore and avoid their responsibilities and that it has taken enormous efforts on the part of the Health and Safety Authority over years to get the building industry to begin to deal with safety problems. It is extraordinary that the Ombudsman is telling local authorities it is about time they used their powers to deal with illegal developments or people who do not properly meet their planning applications.

We now have the minor Government party noticing that management companies are being put in. Management companies are not all an invention of the building industry; they are an invention of local authorities. Why do local authority officials and managers introduce management companies? We all know about multiple use and the intricacies of areas where there are apartments. All of that is dealt with in the Minister's speech, although we did not need him to tell us. We appreciate the complexities but the fact that there are complexities in some areas has begun to be used by local authorities as a reason to impose a blanket solution universally which is annoying people who are struggling to build their own houses. What constantly intrigues me is why it took so long for the Government to notice that.

This new code of ethics the Minister has promised us for local authority officials should not be ready next month or the month after. It should be ready now and it should be clear and explicit that in any position a local authority senior official should not be able to work for anybody who had planning or other business to do with any local authority for a period of two to three years to sanitise that information. That should apply to Government advisers as well because we have had a steady trickle of them out of Government into positions where their knowledge was being put to dubious uses.

The legislation must be amended to make it clear that under section 180, residents can insist that a local authority take an estate in charge, not that they can aspire to and negotiate. It must be made absolutely and unequivocally explicit to city and county managers that where residents request it, their only discretion is the process of moving there. They do not have the discretion to refuse to do so. If the developer has not brought the development up to the acceptable standards, the developer must be required to do so, and once it is done, it must be immediately taken in hand. Anything else is an escaping of responsibility by local authorities, for reasons which are, at the very least, dubious.