Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleague, Senator Fitzpatrick, for sharing her time and the Minister of State for attending the House. I applaud him, the Minister, Darragh O’Brien, and the departmental officials for this comprehensive consolidating legislation. We always ask why we need something like this. The main challenge our country is facing domestically is the building of homes. Insofar as possible, our planning system should facilitate their building. Therefore, it is critical for home building, business and industry that the planning system does not become an obstacle to that. We must also have regard to climate, biodiversity and community infrastructure considerations, all of which are essential. This is about getting the balance right.

In particular, I welcome the greater certainty that the Bill should give to timeframes for planning and its addressing of the problem of spurious claims. My one difficulty with this is the implication for local authorities and an coimisiún pleanála if they do not reach the targets set out. The evidence to date is that An Bord Pleanála continues to fail to meet particular targets. This causes problems for many people. Someone dealing with a planning application wants an answer, yes or no, rather than the uncertainty of the process dragging on. I know of a case in Wexford where what was essentially a spurious claim was brought. The local authority had granted planning permission, which was appealed to An Bord Pleanála spuriously. The board upheld the decision to grant planning permission, but the whole process took more than two years. The project was to be a critical source of employment in County Wexford. What was unfair on those behind the project was the time the process took. The Bill’s measures will be welcome, but it is important that they be enforceable. This speaks to the need for us to have many more experienced planners at local authority and commission level.

I wish to focus on an area of concern, namely, development plans and local area plans. Like others, I am speaking as a former local authority member. This continues to be the greatest area of power and influence that local elected representatives have in our communities. We have an incredibly centralised system of government and the officials in the Minister of State’s Department love taking whatever power they can away from elected local representatives and putting it into the hands of the Custom House, the Office of the Planning Regulator and others. The difficulty I am raising is based on a personal experience. Do not get me wrong, as I believe that local plans should act in concert with regional and national plans and we cannot have wide variations, particularly where we have to have regard to important issues such as climate change and the biodiversity challenge and we have to ensure we can match services to the distribution of the population. Where extending the development plan from six to ten years is concerned, though, that is almost what is happening anyway. Few local authorities revise their plans every six years, mostly because they do not have the planners. I wonder whether a ten-year period is too long. If a local area or county development plan has to have regard to the regional strategy and the national planning framework, the Office of the Planning Regulator will effectively be able to make the ultimate decision on it. The experience to date is that the regulator will micromanage many of the local area plans. I recall being involved in the Gorey local area plan a number of years ago when we acted very responsibly on zoning, acting on the evidence of the census and the information that was provided. However, when we sent in our plans, the Custom House asked us why we had not zoned this or that area. It was down to local knowledge. We knew that if we zoned a particular area, there was not a hope in hell that the farmer would ever allow for development on that land whereas development would take place if we zoned other lands. Having that local knowledge informing the building of homes and so forth is critical. Within this legislation, we need to address the overreach of the OPR. If we followed some of the national planning guidelines and the OPR enforced them in towns like Gorey and Wexford, we should be pulling down homes because too many have been built to fit into the guidelines.

I am concerned by section 21’s requirement for a review of the national planning framework every ten years, with regard to be had of the census. The framework should be far more dynamic. I speak from experience based on my local area and the restrictions placed thereon. In the inter-census period of 2011 to 2016, the population of the Gorey local electoral area grew by 7.3% while national growth was 3.7%. In the inter-census period of 2016 and 2022, the growth in my area was 14% compared to 8% nationally. If this legislative requirement were in place, our area would have been stuck with – indeed, it already has been – a national planning framework that dated back a decade. It has no regard of the rapidly growing population or the demands and needs within that specific area.

I question what I perceive to be a strengthening of the powers of the Office of the Planning Regulator. I agree that there is a need for a co-ordinated approach and that plans need to operate in concert with one another, but the national transport strategy often shows no regard for fitting into local settlement patterns, for example.

On Committee Stage, I hope we can interrogate further the question of how to ensure there will be flexibility to meet specific local challenges, including areas of rapid growth. We have to be human about this. The OPR can say it wants 1,000 extra people to live in a certain town or village, but those 1,000 people may not want to live there and instead have a greater desire to live in the town or village down the road for particular reasons. We have to balance the obligation to have appropriate levels of service with allowing people the right to choose to live where they want for whatever reason.

I commend the Minister of State and the officials. I know how much work has gone into the Bill. I appreciate that he will accept amendments on Committee Stage. I look forward to that debate.