Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will start with the need for a new planning Bill. Any of us who have been on local authorities and trying to navigate the existing planning legislation will understand the need to overhaul it. I acknowledge the role this Government played in this regard because many other governments thought about doing it and ran away from it. However, this Government took it on and has now produced a new planning Bill. Yes, it will be amended on many occasions in years to come. Nothing is perfect and it is a living document, but it was something that needed to be taken on and that has been done.

I will pick up on a few comments Senator McDowell made. I will start where he ended up when he said we have made the system more complex. I will probably agree with him that the system has now become very bureaucratic and very onerous, whether you go from the NPF to the regional plans to the county plans to the local plans. It has been that. Maybe that is slowing down a certain level of development, but to say the NPF was not needed is incorrect. We need a plan to plan. The worst thing this country does is large, critical infrastructure. We are absolutely useless at it, if we think about. I sat on the housing committee in the previous Dáil where we talked about the extraction of the water from the Shannon in 2016. It is needed for the east coast so that we can keep developing. Where has it progressed? It is being talked about again and it is now 2024. We look at the children's hospital, large sewerage infrastructure and rail infrastructure. These need high-level plans so that we can put in place the critical infrastructure that is needed in the country for us to live in it.

Senator McDowell indicated that the NPF was undemocratic. I disagree with him on this point. The NPF started in 2014, and by the time it was adopted, I think it was 2018. It was the Oireachtas that adopted the draft plan, and I believe that was some time in 2017. Then the Government, after consultation, adopted the final national planning framework, which then fed into the regional plans, which involved consultation, and then fed into our county development plans, which equally had a process of consultation. On the point that it was undemocratic, I would say there is nearly too much consultation in the process and that does cause delays.

Much has been said about rural housing and rural planning. This is something very close to my own heart, coming from Glendalough. In the 12 years I spent as a councillor, my biggest role was one-off rural housing. When the draft NPF document was published, it was I who identified that when it came to one-off rural housing, it focused on economic need only. I sat down with the Department, Niall Cussen and others, and we included social need. The reason we now have two definitions of social need and economic need is to deal with the ruling of the Flemish Decree and to stop saying, son or daughter or niece or nephew specifically and generalise it to a person having either an economic need or a social need to live in a rural area. That is at a very high level and then each county development plan takes on those two criteria. This is where it falls down, because it depends on interpretation. Every one of us who has served on a local authority will scratch our head at times when we see two different decisions being made and we wonder how that happened. There is a level of inconsistency in the planning decision-making process when it comes to one-off rural housing, because there are so many factors involved. I might interpret guidelines differently from another planner. We have the sustainable rural housing guidelines, which my former colleague, Dick Roche, adopted in 2005, and they are still in place. We need a new set of guidelines for today, but my fear is about the interpretation of the guidelines.

Another issue in respect of one-off rural housing about which I have a bee in my bonnet is the preplanning consultation. Every county treats the preplanning process completely differently. My own county of Wicklow is probably the worst. It is an email, full stop. In Wexford, a person can have a meeting. If anything is to happen around one-off rural housing, then it should be that there is a clear process put into legislation that each local authority must comply with. One of the hardest things is to get over the qualification criteria for one-off rural housing. Do I or do I not qualify for one-off rural housing? Do I have social need or economic need? If you can overcome that, then you are not wasting money on architects for design and on environmental assessment in relation to wastewater and the landscape. People are throwing good money after bad because they end up not qualifying for one-off rural housing. The process of qualification and of preplanning consultations needs to be made much more specific about what each applicant is entitled to and what they are entitled to get out of the process. That would help resolve some of the one-off planning issues.

The NPF is a valuable document and is needed. Senator Boyhan and I had several arguments with Niall Cussen. I had a major issue with the population targets and how they were distributed. At the time I thought there were very low and, as it has since evolved, that has proven to be correct.

The other issue is the NPF was not a transitional document. It came with a set of rules and then the county development plans had to adopt those rules. It did not allow for a transition period where there was shortage of where we wanted to put population growth, but the critical infrastructure was not there at that time, be it sewerage or transport.

The OPR is only the enforcer of the national planning framework and has no say, in fact, on it. The national planning framework was adopted before the OPR was even commenced or appointed. Yes, that office is there to add a layer of scrutiny to ensure that all plans, whether they be regional or local, comply with all national plans. To say that he or she is controlling it is wrong because the NPF was adopted by the Houses of the Oireachtas. It was a democratic process. We cannot say it was not.