Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. As a preliminary point, this problem has been here for a long time. I have been writing about it in various newspapers for ten years. I am glad to hear what was said by Senator Cummins about Waterford and I am glad that Senator Fitzpatrick is so upbeat about the improvements she sees there. However, the simple fact is we are not doing enough. We are simply not doing enough. Waterford is a beautiful city and there is a beautiful heart to that city. However, Dublin is a disgrace and Dublin City Council is a disgraceful organisation. It presides over dereliction itself. It owns vast swathes of derelict and rundown property yet it does nothing with it. It is paralysed. Somebody said that Dublin – I think it was Joyce – was the centre of paralysis. Dublin is the centre of paralysis when it comes to urban renewal. I pass by, I think, a 2-acre site by the canal at Clanbrassil Street virtually every day on my way home from work. It is clearly in need of being built on. It is derelict. The simple fact is that a family owns it and one member of the family just wants to sit on it. That is the situation and as things stand, that will happen.

Senator Cummins is right. We need a system of vesting orders. We should effectively abandon the old CPO system because the bureaucrats of Dublin City Council just could not manage it. Connaught Street is a great example. They just simply cannot manage it. They are frightened of it and cowardly when it comes to it because it gets bogged down in the courts and all the rest of it. I know we are talking about the country at large and I know we are talking about how in many towns and so on there are individual derelict sites which local authorities could, if they were inspired to do so, do something about. I know that.. However, I am talking about urban renewal in Dublin and I do not believe the people in those two monstrous structures in Wood Quay have any intention of spearheading urban renewal in the city of Dublin. I do not believe they do. I know where their priorities lie. They issued a statement yesterday saying they do not propose consulting communities about traffic arrangements any more. They will try them out and that will be the consultation. They will try them out for a while and then see what happens. That is a priority. Kayaking was a priority for one particular denizen of those buildings. Cycling is a priority. However, building a beautiful city is not a priority of Dublin City Council. Full stop, it is not.

There is a way around this, which is to set up an agency or a commission that could just go down a street and say that the following housings are derelict, underused or falling into dereliction and serve notices, effectively. It is not that weeds have to be growing out of them but they are needed for urban renewal. This is the point. If there is the vesting system in relation to derelict sites, that is one thing. However, if you have non-derelict land right beside a derelict site and proper planning would involve redeveloping the whole thing and giving a lease to a developer of the entire block, the mere fact that in the middle of it there is a non-derelict house or building – one building that is not derelict propped up with wood on either side – means you have to go to the Housing Act to get your power to purchase it. We cannot simply say to somebody who has a pub going in the middle of a massive area of dereliction that we are taking their house and throwing it in with the derelict land and we will vest it in the local authority.

I do not blame some of the people I have accused of cowardice when it comes to the legal system because the CPO system is massively overcomplicated. However, I take the point that was made that the planning Act that is now coming through simply does not address this issue at all. It is pathetic that it does not. We need agencies in our major cities - I think local authorities should handle it in smaller towns and villages – that actually engage in envisaging what a street or area could look like and positively plan to make that area beautiful. There is no real planning in Dublin city. If I own a site, I can apply for permission, effectively, to build what I want on it and as long as it conforms to planning zoning and is not appallingly ugly, I can put it up. Nobody will ever ask me how this will fit in with the redevelopment of a local community. Nobody ever really decides to look at a whole area of substandard urban land and say we need to knock down 20 houses to make this area beautiful again and we will have to do something like that. In the beautiful parts of Dublin such as the great estates like the Pembroke, Meath and Gardiner estates, they were built by people with the power to grant building leases and who had the plan and could say that Merrion Square will not have two-storey houses on one side and six-storey houses on the other. I am not advocating for the return of the gentry. All I am saying is that everything beautiful in our urban heritage comes from the exercise of entirely different commercial and planning laws compared to what is now the uglification of our cities. I take the positives from what Senators Cummins and Fitzpatrick said but look at Dublin; it is a disgrace. Dublin City Council is a disgrace. Its priorities are all wrong. Its powers are not adequate and it does not have the desire to build a beautiful capital city. As long as that is the case, we will have not merely the visually ugly but the run-down, deprived feeling in the north inner city in particular, which gives rise to the many problems with which we are all dealing. I support the motion and what the Labour Party is talking about. It is a very valuable contribution. Let us do something more about it and not just say everything is fine in Waterford. Everything is awful in Dublin.