Denis Landy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be brief. Lest there be any misunderstanding I put on record again that I welcome the Minister and what he is trying to do. If there was an inference, and I am not saying there was, that because we do not agree with everything in the Bill, we do not want to solve the housing problem, nothing could be further from the truth. We might be approaching the issue in a different way.

I am trying to pick up some threads where we can find common ground on this specific issue. In his closing remarks the last day the Minister stated that the idea that local councillors have no role is not the case and there is no reason the procedure that exists in local authorities whereby controversial planning applications are referred to a committee for discussion, with planners getting feedback from democratically elected councillors on how they look at planning applications, cannot happen during the pre-planning consultation process. He indicated that ultimately the planners make recommendations on planning issues and, of course, councillors make decisions on zoning issues, local area plans, policy considerations and a series of other issues, including the county development plan.

Senator Coffey commented earlier and if we could take out counties with cities, which are Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Galway and perhaps some counties in the midlands with a high population, there would not be too many of these applications. On the previous day I used the example of Fingal which had 800 applications made in the first eight months of 2015, but of those only seven applications had in excess of 100 units. We are not talking about many of these applications as we speak but if building is ratcheted up, perhaps we will see it.

This is a suggestion from the Minister, but could he not put it in the Bill as a statutory requirement because it would assist the concerns of councillors, and which I have on behalf of councillors, as well as the concerns of ordinary people who do not want to see a sleight of hand? The word "developer", unfortunately, has become a bad word but there are many good developers. I worked with many good developers over the years who built necessary social and private housing. The word has become associated with bad things that happened, so when people think about developers, they believe something underhanded is possibly being done. I ask the Minister to put the issue of large multi-unit developments on a statutory footing, as this might assist or assuage the concerns that I and others have about democratic input at local level being pulled from the system as proposed.