Dan Boyle (Green Party)

-----at present needs and does not build towards future progress in the communities concerned.

Much of the debate on planning in this country has been about blind alleys. There has been much talk about one-off housing. Most of the planning permissions in this country are for one-off housing. There are said to be difficulties in obtaining such permission, especially for family members. I must admit that has not been my experience, not only as a Member of this House and the other House where my constituency was a mixture of urban, suburban and rural, but also in my private life as a rural community development worker with Muintir na Tíre. The question we have never asked ourselves in this debate is why Irish settlement patterns in rural communities are different from those in rural communities in other countries. In other countries with similar patterns of small-sized farms and similar spatial population the rural settlement policies are nothing like the Irish experience.

In fact, in another of my employment experiences, while working with the then National Rehabilitation Board in what was a vast area, what in church terms is known as the diocese of Cloyne, the largest Roman Catholic diocese in the country which takes in the north and east of County Cork and is one of the biggest geographical areas in the country, one of the main areas of work with which I had to deal was persons with psychiatric difficulties living in isolation. There are difficulties in not having an effective planning policy that takes account of people living in isolated areas and the cost of the services to each individual housing unit. Such difficulties result in the failure to achieve a cohesive community. It is amazing that rural Ireland works so well despite that. Rural communities operate to a higher level than urban communities where people live on top of each other. Despite that, they are properly more distant from each other than their rural counterparts. However, that does not change the fact that in rural communities it costs more to provide services for people living in these communities and we must achieve an appropriate balance.

I do not see why there should be a difficulty, not in discouraging one-off housing but in encouraging greater town and village development. I must admit I find it difficult to understand the arguments that have been made along these lines in the past 20 years. One organisation for which I have had much time in the past is Rural Resettlement Ireland, which established itself to rebuild the fabric of deserted properties in rural Ireland and quickly changed its reason for being as a defence of one-off housing in any circumstances in any location, which is not a good use of planning principles.

The reason this Bill needs to be supported is that we need a planning system that suits the needs of the 21st century. We need to ally the broad principles that existed in the 1963 Act with the further improvements that were introduced such as limiting the power of the manager and the elected representative and introducing An Bord Pleanála so that there is greater cohesiveness and consistency in the planning process.

As someone who has been an activist on local grounds, I share the frustration that many Members of this House and persons in public life must feel about An Bord Pleanála. It has made many decisions that have been the right decisions, but it has made decisions that seem beyond explanation for reasons that cannot even be understood when an official explanation is offered. One of the saddest grounds on which An Bord Pleanála has either accepted or overturned decisions in the past is its refusal to state that a particular planning decision should be made on sound planning grounds but rather that sound planning grounds are overridden by whatever Government policy is at a given time.

I hope with this legislation and with legislation that is to follow soon that the principles underlining any planning decision and any development plan would always be based on sound planning, that there would not be political or commercial criteria and, above all else, that it would be the needs of the people living in the immediate area that would get prime consideration. After almost 50 years of planning legislation in this country, we have yet to get that balance right.

I applaud the Minister for the efforts he is making in this initial legislation. It is the most significant planning Bill since 1963. It will change the Statute Book in the right direction in a way that it has not been changed to date and I look forward to the House making further improvements to ensure finally we can have a planning system in which the citizens can have faith.