David Norris (Independent)

In that case, I am put in a quandary. Once gain the Government is trying to pick a popular issue — rural housing. Allowing one-off housing is seen to be supporting the farmers. The Government is doing what it has a tendency to do in this area, which is curry favour with a specific element. As we are discussing housing, the Minister might remember a debate we had in this House last week in which Senator O'Toole and I managed to unearth a memorandum that showed the Government had stood over the construction of 250,000 hollow-brick houses which were defective in terms of heat conservation. They were an environmental threat. The Government did so to satisfy the demands of a certain section of the cement lobby.

I object to the Government always going for the easy vote. It curries favour with, for example, farmers and people in rural areas who want naturally — it is a very human wish — to be allowed to build wherever they like and to be able, in circumstances where farming is not as economically viable as it used to be, to make a living by selling off plots. They often doctor it up as if it were for a son or daughter and once they get permission, it is flogged off, as the Minister knows perfectly well.

There are votes in this kind of thing, just as there are votes in trashing groups such as An Taisce. I am glad the Minister is present because I want to say this directly to him. He has played a personal role in the trashing of An Taisce and undermining it. The Government set out to do this with a chorus of approval from people with strong local authority links by undermining its statutory status, removing its grants, and turning it from a very useful organisation into one that is plagued by difficulties because of the way it has been undermined. We now have a virtually amateur organisation and eventually the Government will remove its status. This is damaging.

We all know the impact of one-off housing on the tourist business. People from throughout the world continually ask me how we can destroy our own country and kill the goose that lays the golden egg in this atrocious and unsophisticated way. This is always met by the accusations of so-called Dublin 4 voices. It is not just Dublin 4 voices. I hear it now from people who have lived in the countryside all their lives. They are just as appalled as I am at what is happening in rural Ireland. There is a significant problem. How are we allowing houses with no sewerage, no effective planning and no services? Do people have the right to put a house wherever they like and then expect the taxpayer to supply all these services? If the Government is only looking for their vote, it will promise them anything. I would like to think that a responsible Government would take into account the national interest.

The same applies to affordable housing. A great noise was made about affordable housing and how we would look after people. We have not done it. Once again we have given in to a group that is too close to Fianna Fáil, the major party in Government — the building industry. Those in that industry are allowed to weasel out of putting affordable housing in their nice expensive developments. They buy it off. The Minister is an artist in this regard. I heard him this morning talking about how, despite us being bottom of the class in terms of Kyoto, we will buy our way out with carbon credits. It is a disaster. We should not be doing this. We should not allow the builders to weasel out in this way and trade off useless bits of land so that people will be deprived of housing.

The Minister's party was once the party of the plain people of Ireland. The Government is not doing any favours to the plain people of Ireland in its housing policy.