Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

When does it happen is the question I have to ask. It is very easy to mutter about this and say it can happen, but it does not happen. The same machine that is in the Department of housing and local government is the parent of the daughter institution, the OPR. They select each other for all these positions as managers, or now chief executives, of county councils. There is a prefecture installed in Ireland that obeys a code of its own. That is the reality of the situation. Senator Fitzpatrick says a local authority can initiate a process to vary its development plan. It can, but when this is initiated the chief executive is bound to come back with a report to the elected members and if he or she tells them he or she thinks it contradicts the national planning framework, ministerial guidelines or whatever, then at that stage it is dead in the water unless the members insist on it. By the time that happens the OPR has been consulted on it, has consulted the chief executive of the local authority and its planning section and the die is cast.

Let us not cod ourselves here. We are putting together an antidemocratic centralised control system. I do not particularly worry about what Wexford County Council members are planning for Wexford. I wish them well in planning their area as they wish. I do not want somebody sitting in Dublin saying "Hold it" because the Government, at the insistence of the Minister, issued a national planning framework and the council does not seem to be paying it sufficient attention. I do not want to hear about national planning statements and the deference that has to be given to them by local authority members. All of that is a symptom of our unwillingness to trust elected local authority members to the same extent as those on United Kingdom local authorities are permitted to exercise their judgment. If these provisions were put before Westminster they would be laughed out of it, but we are prepared to subjugate local government to centralised control, centralised revision and centralised reversal. I know of no other country in the world that does that. I know of no common law country or civil law country which says a man or woman called the planning regulator shall be independent in their functions and shall effectively veto what is, subject to not being overridden by a Minister, the democratic wishes of a local authority. It does not have to be like this. We have grown accustomed to it. We have become house-trained by the gradual changes that took place in our planning system because we were so afraid of corruption by local authority members we thought they should be supervised to the extent they are. The great majority of local authority members are decent, straightforward, honourable people who are not corrupt and never have been corrupt, for that matter.

Only a tiny minority at one stage engaged in dubious and corrupt activity in respect of rezoning. However, this is not the remedy.

I will return to the point about which I was contacted today. Unless local authorities can acquire land easily, without going to the High Court or going through the ridiculous obstacle course of compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, unless they have an effective system of mobilising the land resources in their local authority functional areas, unless they can drive development rather than wait for random proposals from the private sector, and unless we have a system that radically changes, we will not have beautiful cities but ugly cities. We will not have adequate social housing or a mix of social, affordable and private housing to an adequate extent. We will have areas which are blighted and we will have the mess of Upper O'Connell Street.

I travel down the southern quays every day and I will be doing so until some day in mid-August when it will become illegal to do so. I notice across the river the site of the Ormond Hotel, which features in Ulysses. It has now been demolished and left empty for eight to ten years in a strategic and scenic part of our city. In any other world, the local authority would have taken that land from the developers, handed it to somebody and asked them to develop it quickly, within a year or two. The authority would have given that person a building lease and taken a use-it-or-lose-it approach. We do not have use-it-or-lose-it laws. We have derelict site laws that are grossly ineffective. As I said, the Carlton Cinema saga shows precisely how weak and ineffectual Irish local government is on its premier thoroughfare, which has been blighted for 20 or 30 years now. No other capital city anywhere in the civilised world would permit that situation to continue but that is what we have done.

You can have permissive. There are two things here. A Scandinavian academic went to Galway City Council and asked to see its plan for the city. He was shown the development plan and said it was not a plan but a series of restrictions. He asked what the council was going to do to build, rebuild and redevelop the city. The representatives of the council looked at him as if he was from another planet. We do not have positive planning in this country. We allow developers to put together sites randomly and to come up with random plans to develop their sites when there is sufficient profit to be made. We do not have the approach that made Dublin beautiful. Pembroke estate lies to the south of this House. It did not happen as a result of random planning. Gardiner Street, Mountjoy Square and all of those areas on the north side of the city did not arise from permissive planning but from positive planning. The sad fact is we are cementing into place negative and permissive so-called planning, which, in fact, does not plan and does not have any positive aspect to it but merely tells people what they cannot do and what certain people would love other people to do, but not what local authorities will do, to bring about positive development in their areas.