Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I propose to respond to each of the Senators in turn.

Senator Coffey was concerned about the way the Bill had been handled. The discussions between the Attorney General and the European Commission continued until late May. The officials in the Department and the Bills Office worked long hours and pushed themselves hard to ensure the Bill would be ready. In an ideal world I would have had these amendments three months ago, but we needed to engage in protracted negotiations on the transposition of European directives into Irish law. Had it been possible to table them in the Houses earlier, they would have been.

The Bill does not contain too much by way of commands and the control of planning. For the past ten years Ireland has suffered as a result of there being too little planning and a laissez-faire approach. The changes proposed in the Bill will reduce the need for ministerial intervention. The last thing a Minister, irrespective of the political strings on his or her bow, wants to do is to assert the Department's views over the development plans of individual planning authorities. One could spend one's life doing this. The proposed changes will ensure co-ordination between what is occurring on the ground within communities and the national spatial strategy. They will also ensure joined-up thinking between all of the elements involved. One does not want national, regional and local policies to differ. The ethos behind the Bill is to ensure joined-up thinking.

Senator Coffey mentioned the national spatial strategy. Although it is eight years old, it is a document which spans a period of 20 years. We are refreshing it to reflect the changed reality of Ireland in 2010. The new document will better inform the decisions that must be made in the next while to ensure we will not duplicate spending on health, education and transport services and social issues to ensure the State will get the best value for money, given the limited amount of cash available.

Regarding rural housing, the rural planning guidelines still stand and are a strong attempt to find a compromise between opinions on whether housing should be located in cities, towns and rural areas. A reasonable compromise is possible. The effect of the Bill on small towns and villages will be beneficial, as no town or village wants to be swamped by unnecessary traffic. We want them to work better and be developed more coherently. We do not want to see an awful, enormous and empty apartment development suddenly appearing two miles outside a town as if by magic. We are trying to ensure there will be no surprises and that there will be some level of commonality, understanding and support for what occurs, instead of the adversarial system evident in recent years, under which developers were pitted against communities and urban dwellers against rural dwellers. The object of the Bill is to ensure co-ordination and a coherent strategy. It will lead to better towns and villages and more vibrant rural areas. People who need to live in the country will be able to do so, but in some areas we have reached the point where one cannot push a buggy down a country road without needing to jump, buggy and all, the moment one hears a car, normally driven by a young blackguard, shooting down the road at 50 mph. We must slow things down and ensure our limited resources will be available to build footpaths where necessary, instead of adopting a scattergun approach, whereby a council acts like a headless chicken in trying to work out where it should spend money to accommodate every demand made on it from north, south, east and west. The rural planning guidelines stand. The Bill is concerned with the better co-ordination of development.

Senator Ellis made a point about land reclamation. We argued the toss on Committee Stage. Through Coastwatch Ireland and the Labour Party, the strong opinion conveyed to me was that we should be careful in wetland and estuarine areas, the areas where endangered species are often found. I am referring to the corncrake and other species that one would like to see co-exist peacefully with humans. We need to get the balance right between people, flora and fauna. I take St. Francis's view of the world more, rather than place humans above everything else. The Bill tries to strike this balance and will not interfere with REPS or the agri-environment programmes. If particular concerns are brought to the attention of the Senator, we will consider them. Given that I have one foot in the door of the Department of Agriculture, Fishers and Food, I would be happy to pursue any issues raised.

The Bill makes an allowance for forestry roads, but in respect of their connections with public roads, planning permission will be required for health and safety reasons. I take the point about the damage forestry trucks can inflict on minor rural roads. According to an amazing equation, the damage is proportionate to one million times its axle weight. It is for the Department of Transport to address this issue. As I wear a hat in that Department, I might revert to the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, to determine what can be done about it. Overloaded forestry trucks can be a disaster on minor roads.

Senator O'Reilly mentioned the concerns about whether rural dwellings will be permitted. They will be, as the rural planning guidelines still stand. Carefully phrased, they are more than generous for those who need and deserve to live in rural areas in which their families live. I sympathise with Senator Norris in many of his comments in that a child of a rural dweller does not have a God-given right to have a house in the same area. I am one of eight children and grew up in one of the few rural parts of south Dublin. I do not believe that I and my seven brothers and sisters have a right to build a new house beside the family home. The road would not be wide enough to take the amount of traffic. The late Spike Milligan said, I believe, that having five or six children, he had not realised he and his wife had given birth to an entire traffic jam.

When we look back 50 or 100 years to the bailte fearainn that Professor Seamus Caulfield and some great champions of rural life advocate, we moved in very different ways in the countryside then. These days we drive 20 or 30 miles to work very often and we have given rise to an enormous amount of carbon emissions associated with transport. We must be careful in weighing up the strong social and economic ties as to whether we are getting the balance right in that regard.

There are cases where permission is refused, on very strong grounds, and often it is on road safety or flooding grounds or as regards failing percolation tests. I have seen houses with rushes growing up to the back door, and the owners are surprised when the water laps in during heavy rain. Neither I nor any Minister or Minister of State wants to be here in two or three years time in late November watching Jim Fahy telling us how failed planning policies gave rise to building on flood plains. We have brought in flood planning guidelines and I want to see them enforced. I want to ensure that people do not walk blind into buildings somewhere, where it is inappropriate.

Not only have we had significant flooding in many areas, we have also had widespread contamination of water supplies in our towns and cities, whether Ennis or Galway, and very often the roots of these contamination problems lie in inappropriate planning and a lack of thinking as regards agricultural emissions and septic tanks that are not doing the job. This has got to be balanced.

As regards the assertion about 80% of housing being removed, I do not see any evidence for that. I do not see any evidence in the legislation, the regulation or in the circular letter. I invite the Senator to go back and see where that assertion came from because I do not believe it stands up. However, we want to protect people from flooding. We want to ensure they are entitled to clean water and that road safety concerns are addressed. There is tremendous pressure on all of us. I was a councillor for 12 years and I am aware there is enormous pressure to try and sort people out as regards planning and other issues. We have got to get the balance right. I do not apologise for a second for trying to push through the legislation to get the balance right.

I would like to believe we will make it possible for people to live in the right place. I want to make it easier for children to walk to school, for older people to walk to church, the pub or to the shops. That does not mean shoehorning everybody into towns and cities, but it means getting the balance right between people who should be in the countryside being there and those who perhaps are better off in towns, cities or villages having affordable housing available in tandem with decent design and planning. I reiterate that it is the absence rather than a surplus of planning that has got us into the difficulties we are in.

I agree with the concerns raised by Senator Dearey. As he pointed out bad planning or the absence of planning contributed to the enormous legacy we and our children will have to bear, as regards the National Asset Management Agency. I make no bones about it, and believe that if we had thought more carefully about where developments should go and the types that were required as well as whether the community needed them, we would have produced a much better Ireland. In the cold grey light of paying the interest payments on NAMA, we have to think carefully about those issues.

I agree with much of what Senator Norris had to say. I look forward to taking up the debate on section 33 of the Bill perhaps. On the issue of judicial review, we have to get the balance right. I notice some concerns were raised on what is in the draft legislation. I believe we are trying to get a decent compromise between what is necessary to ensure people have access to participate in the planning process while ensuring we do not bog down the courts with vexatious or excessive amounts of judicial review. I hope we have the balance right in that regard.