Mark Dearey (Green Party)

The real blame lies with a planning law that was all about driving development. In so many ways it was a developer's charter. There was a lack of adherence to superior planning documentation and national strategic planning documentation. I find it difficult to believe that such legislation found its way onto the Statute Book, that one could have a statutory basis for the national spatial strategy but county development plans did not need to pay attention to it. That meant we had a situation where it was every county for itself. One can see that in particular when one looks at the interface between counties. Perhaps that is not the case in a large county such as Cork but it is true of some of the smaller counties where there was a need to sell off the family silver to provide local authority funding because there was no sustainable way of raising funds at local authority level. If nothing else, the second home tax shows the way forward in that regard. When revenues were needed and zoning could generate such revenue, the strategy of rezoning was adopted. It was tempting to give planning permission and get the levies to allow the local authority to keep going for another year. Where developers were playing local authorities off each other, as happened, the result was an appalling interface of shopping centres and houses along county boundaries that make no sense. They have nothing to do with the nearby town. That is something the future reform of local government must address, namely, the need for a town to be seen as part of a wider district, not as a competing entity with the next county.

I am ranging over a number of areas: local government finance, local government reform, inadequate planning legislation and the reckless way in which money was lent and in which people were encouraged to buy into an ephemeral dream. It all contributes to the need to make real the problem, as the document under discussion has done, and appoint the experts to make the recommendations to guide local authorities in dealing case by case basis with the problems they face. Such problems are acute in my county of Louth. No doubt they are similarly acute in other parts of the country. I commend the Minister of State, Deputy Cuffe, and the Minister of State, Deputy Finneran, in this regard. I wish them well as they begin to address this dreadful legacy which we need to deal with in a foreshortened way.