Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

A couple of things occur to me. First, we face a housing emergency and need to have dynamic and early response reactions to the housing crisis that is happening at the moment. Therefore, I commend the Minister on his hands-on approach. He is confounding some of his critics by the dynamism of his approach and his willingness to address the issues quickly. I must commiserate with the Minister that he is in charge of what is possibly one of the worst Departments. I am sorry if any of his officials here take offence at that. The fundamental problem with local government and planning in Ireland has been the attitude of the Custom House to local government. It has been an attitude of distrust, control and clampdown at every stage.

One of our biggest problems has been that we have a negative view of the concept of planning. There is a view that somehow it is the function of local government to set out rules that must be obeyed and to say "if you comply with them you can go ahead but if you do not comply with them you cannot go ahead, and within those two parameters we do not care what you do." One might say it is a liberal point of view to let people do what they want. On occasion, I pretend to be a liberal. Liberalism does not mean an approach, particularly in urban planning, which is based on letting things happen. If large developers assemble sites and develop plans for a 20-storey block here and a ten-storey block there, we should not just let them at it. We should not choose not to intervene other than working out whether the proposal conforms with some preordained set of values.

I strongly believe cities have to be planned. I have had representations made to me as a Senator, which is possibly a futile thing for many people to do, in respect of the area where I live. Representations have been made to me in respect of The O'Rahilly's house on Herbert Park, the site at the corner opposite the Smurfit building on the bottom of Eglinton Road in Dublin 4 and other places. My simple view is that the SHD process has given rise to a theory that virtually anything - a 12-storey apartment block, for example - can be built if a sufficiently large site is assembled. One of the curious things is that I was brought up in a rent-controlled house on Upper Leeson Street where a relatively low-level development, a three-storey development called Leeson Village, now exists. One remnant of that development is the corner site between Appian Way and Upper Leeson Street, which Members may have seen. It is now owned by the Ronan Group, which is proposing a ten-storey apartment block in the middle of nowhere in this precinct which is at most three or four storeys. That is not the only such development. In Donnybrook village, there was an application for a skyscraper development on the site beside Donnybrook Garda station by Denis O'Brien's company. We are living in a confused state of affairs. Dublin City Council has been emasculated as regards its positive duty to have a vision for what Dublin should look like. Post the Civil War, O'Connell Street was rebuilt according to a city plan. There is no plan anymore. People build skyscrapers, apartment blocks and this, that and the other and it does not matter how these interact with other buildings on the street. With regard to some of the sites I mentioned earlier, to build a 16-storey block of apartments because it comes within a definition of a strategic housing development is a ridiculous way to plan for Donnybrook, Leeson Street or wherever. It does not make any sense at all because it depends on the capacity of a developer to secure 1.5 or 2 acres and then ram up whatever he or she thinks is an appropriate development. We need a different approach.

Building high is not the only way to build intensively. I have friends in the auctioneering business who have said to me that if you look at some areas of Dublin where there is intensive development, namely, the artisan buildings erected in the 1890s-1910s, there is a higher density there than you will ever get in some elevated structures.

I said earlier that the Minister for Housing, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is in charge of one of the worst Departments in the governmental structure. There has been a complete failure to accredit local government with any real positive planning role. Local authorities cannot CPO without the approval of or the financial go-ahead from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. They should be taking up derelict, semi-derelict, half developed and, sometimes, undeveloped, precincts of the city and putting in a place a plan for them. They have adequate powers under the Planning Acts and the Housing Acts to make acquisitions, to redevelop and to hand-out leases to third parties to redevelop these premises but they have faced an entirely negative and downward pressure from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage with regard to what they should and should not do. They are being told to stay clear of a particular site - I will not mention any name - until such time as the developer assembles the site and, perhaps, for 20 years, until such time as the row about the ransom site in the middle of it is sorted out, not to apply CPOs and to not use their powers to achieve what they want to achieve.

I welcome where the Minister is going now in terms of re-establishing the two-tier approach. The one-tier approach is very hard to justify. The Minister also needs, in the longer term, to look at his Department. Is the Department trying to control the local authorities or is it willing to trust them, especially the urban authorities, with the capacity to redesign cities and make sense of them?