Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am very glad that we have got to this point of the debate on this legislation. It is time to reflect for a little bit on what is involved in this Bill. This Bill's origins, as I see it, are a project spearheaded in a big way by my successor as Attorney General, Mr. Paul Gallagher, to restate and consolidate the planning law of the country. His office, in fact, took over in large measure the construction and drafting of this Bill and the form that it takes today. As I said yesterday, I am strongly of the view that this Bill should not have been produced before this House in its present form. If the Government intended to make reforms, it should have done those reforms in separate legislation and a consolidating Bill, for which provision is made under the Standing Orders of both Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann, should have followed so we can see what is new, what is not new and what the philosophy is in the legislation.

We are now faced with this massive supertanker coming into dock in a very small port, if I may put it that way, because no matter what is said in this House we are not going to debate most of the sections in this Bill because we are not going to have the opportunity to do so. Somebody, somehow, decided that it was hugely urgent that all of this should happen. There is some merit in relying on the proposition that the housing crisis needed a different approach but the housing crisis does not need this telephone directory of a Bill, which cost €71 to purchase if anybody has in fact purchased it. The housing crisis does not need this and doing something on housing does not need all of this gobbledegook that we are dealing with here.

In relation to the national planning framework and the national planning statements, I hope Senator Higgins will not be too disappointed when I say I find I agree with an awful lot of what she is saying. In fact, I agree with nearly everything she has said. This is a massive transfer of power to a departmental structure which consists of the Minister and the Office of the Planning Regulator and away from local authorities, local communities, this House and the other House and public accountability. There is no accountability in the national planning framework mechanism. There simply is not. It is a document which is redolent of something, and I hope do not annoy the left-wing people here, of Stalinist Russia such as Gosplan or something like that which has been brought up as the great framework in which and under which everything will happen in Ireland from now on. Everything will all be co-ordinated and everything will be interrelated and every factor will be taken into consideration in every decision that is made. It will all cohere together in an almost idealistic way to say that Ireland in future will be planned.

That is not the way real, free, dynamic, liberal economies work. It is not the way nearly everything we see around us came into being. It simply is not. The notion that one Minister can come up with a national planning framework and get his or her colleagues in government to approve it is absurd. That this has somehow descended from Mount Sinai like the tablets of the Ten Commandments and is brought down to earth where it then becomes the cornerstone of all development in this country is nonsense. This is not the real world. This is a recipe for sclerosis in a country. It is not the great opportunity where everything is going to be wonderful from now on. Everything is going to be regulated from now on. The OPR is going to say "No" from now on. Nobody is going to challenge the OPR because there is no mechanism to challenge the OPR. The OPR is independent. The OPR is not subject to our views and such limited rights as the Minister has to challenge OPR views as provided for in this Part are so difficult to engage politically that we are in fact giving to a Department and its daughter agency, the OPR, massive powers to determine not how Ireland develops in future but much more likely does not develop in future. This is a recipe for stopping things happening, rather than starting things happening.

I look to the housing crisis to which this Bill is the great antidote and ask myself very simple questions. The Department of housing and its predecessors have been involved for the last half century in dealing with the housing problem and the availability of public and affordable housing. At some stage, when I was in government there were too many houses being built and they were all being built in the wrong places we were told, and people could not buy or afford them in the end and we were told that half of them would have to be demolished. Funnily enough, when I am down in Dromad, Roosky, Scramoge and places like that in County Roscommon, I see houses that everyone said would never be occupied but that are now occupied. I see that this plan would probably say they would not be built there, they would be built somewhere else which the OPR will decide is a better place to build them.

The real question is this; is this the answer? Is the plan here, the national planning statement and the national planning framework going to produce more houses? I do not think it is. It is going to give oodles of people plenty of pretext to object to a whole series of things. It is going to introduce a vast complexity of criteria for anything to happen in future in this country. It is going to give the Office of the Planning Regulator in particular a veto over virtually anything that that independent, unregulated, unresponsible, unaccountable entity decides is in breach of guidelines which it, inevitably, will end up drafting.

The notion there is somebody down in the Custom House or wherever they are, who is going to draft up this framework and statements for the Minister and the OPR is going to come along afterwards and look at it is wrong. The OPR is going to be involved in the entire generation process for all of these plans. I am strongly of the view that what we are doing here is making this country a more difficult place for development to happen. We need development because we have a growing population. We need other values, too. People talk about the maintenance of rural Ireland, but to again go back to those places in County Roscommon that I mentioned - it is good to get out of Dublin sometimes - is to see communities dying on their feet for want of young people to play in their local football club, banks evaporating, pubs closing, hotels now closing for various reasons, the economy atrophying and main streets just mouldering. There are huge forces taking place in rural Ireland which deprives rural Ireland of its meaning. On the other hand, and I hope they will not take exception to this, we have the green lobby saying we must live in villages. We must increasingly live in towns and villages. It is wrong to have one-off housing. Look at an old Ordnance Survey map. Look at all the little black squares where people used to live. They do not live there any more.

The houses are all deserted. They are abandoned or falling down. In some areas, people cannot even get a quarter of an acre from their parents to build a house. People want to live close to their parents but they are told the problem is that if they build on a particular site, they will have a transport problem, which would be inconsistent with national energy policy or, alternatively, that the sewerage arrangements would not be as collective in nature as would be the case in a village or a town.

All of this is coming from the notion that there is somebody in either the OPR or the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in Dublin who knows how best to plan for this country. If that were the case, the Department would have transformed this country, dealt with the housing crisis, planned our cities and stopped urban sprawl. It would have done all those things effectively. It would have known when it abolished bedsits that it was a good thing. It would also have known that strategic housing developments were a good thing, even though they were later abandoned, and that it had the right approach to so many things. If I believed this conglomerate of executive power, namely the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the OPR, had all the answers and had a track record to prove it, I would have some sympathy with what is contained in the legislation. What I see is the direct opposite, however.

I see right across Ireland a very different reality, which is that we fail constantly. It is not for want of having a central plan or a big planning Act, it is for the very simple reason that in Dublin city there is no plan to CPO land in order to rebuild streets. There is no effective power of compulsory purchase to build a vibrant city centre any more. I was at a meeting recently at which an experienced Labour Party councillor told me that compulsory purchase in Dublin is impossible. It takes 15 years for a CPO to be conceived and implemented in Dublin city. The signs are all about us, including dereliction, underuse of land, and all the rest of it. We do not have a clue. We are in a position, however, to devise big projects on the outskirts of Dublin where land is more easily manageable, but we are not willing or capable of rebuilding our city's central core. We have hotels and all sorts of things planned for city centres but we do not have living communities there. I will not go into it, but now the same people have convinced themselves that traffic is the problem. Traffic is what is making Dublin a poor city to live in, but it is not. Traffic is not the problem, and clearing the city centre of traffic is not the answer either. That is a distraction.

I agree with the thrust of what Senator Higgins has said, which is that all of this is completely undemocratic. It is also unnecessary. When I criticised the OPR yesterday, I did it with a passion because I distrust the huge power and influence that agency, which is supposed to be independent and therefore unaccountable, is going to have over how Ireland develops in future. That agency was developed within the Department. I will not go into personalities, but it was devised by somebody who wanted a place for that person to operate in a different way. That is its origin. All power has been concentrated such that even a politically appointed Minister who comes up with these statements and who is supposed to generate - with the consent of the Government - a national planning framework is going to be subject to massive internal domination by the OPR.

I have supported amendments proposed by Senator Boyhan to add people who should be consulted, such as local councillors and the like, but I see litanies of people who have to be consulted before anything happens in future. I do not think this is the right way to go. I am not making some kind of ideological point. I believe there is a dead hand being created here - and an undemocratic dead hand - which is going to tell communities in Ireland that there are criteria by which they can develop and criteria by which they may not develop. It is a case of one size fits all.

There has been talk about cities, but is Limerick's problem the same as Dublin's problem or is Galway's problem the same as Dublin's problem? I do not think so. I do not think that Wexford's problems are the same as Monaghan's. There are major differences. Those differences should be accommodated by giving the people of Monaghan and those in the south east, whether we want to deal with it on the basis of the old county or regional strategies, the right to dictate the future of their areas or at least to create the criteria by which they want to live, quite separate from the views of the members of an elite in Dublin who think they know everything.

I will go back to a point made by Senator Boyhan yesterday. It is extraordinary that the chief planners in local authorities do not need to have any planning qualifications whatsoever. What the person must have, as I see it, is experience of the bureaucracy that is what I call a prefecture of management pretending to be part of a system of democratic local government.

I will not delay the House any further, but I strongly support the view that, at the very least, if we are going down this road – I doubt the wisdom of much of what is involved - it can only be done with a massively increased democratic accountability and a massively decreased bureaucratic dominance for Ministers, statements, frameworks, regulators and the like. This country does not need more of that, it probably needs a lot less of it.