I welcome the opportunity to speak on this subject. One could spend days discussing either housing, planning or transportation.
As a county councillor in County Donegal, I know that one of the most regular issues brought to my attention is planning. The number of planning applications from local people, returning emigrants or strangers wishing to build a family or holiday home has increased dramatically. It seems the drafting of the new county development plan in County Donegal has caused hysteria. This increase is a healthy sign and a vote of confidence in our region by those who wish to invest or to settle down there.
The national debate County Clare has helped to generate mirrors many of the issues with which Donegal County Council is trying to grapple. It is difficult to strike a balance between encouraging people to invest in our beautiful county and maintaining the countryside and between trying to make our limited infrastructure cater for existing settlements and providing funding for new largescale developments. I hope the national development plan provides increased funding for infrastructure, such as water, sewerage and roads. It is also difficult to strike a balance between sustaining a vibrant countryside and becoming a seasonal holiday village for the rich from other parts of the island or for foreign urban dwellers who can avail of good exchange rates. The current exchange rate has created a great difficulty or opportunity, depending on whether one is a landowner or a local person trying to buy land for building. A difficult balance must be struck between enabling land owners to supplement their incomes from the poor fishing and farming that prevails in Donegal by selling off sites and keeping the price of house sites within the range of local people. One of the most difficult aspects of this question, as has been discovered in County Clare, is defining a local person. Given that the Inishowen electoral area now receives one third of all planning applications for Donegal, these balances are of great concern to everyone who lives in the peninsula, and rightly so. The work of finalising a county development plan must take each of these concerns into account. While I commend Donegal County Council on its high level of interaction with the community, I am sure the debate engendered in other counties will be helpful to our case.
The Planning and Development Bill will make many improvements to the system. However, planning offices must be better resourced. It is important that decisions on applications be made speedily and that those who build without permission be challenged in an effective and efficient manner. It is also important that these ideals are not simply committed to paper but are resourced so that a speedy turnover of work can realistically occur.
One of our greatest difficulties in County Donegal is the turnover of planning officials. The Inishowen region has been one of the hardest hit and we have had eight or ten planning officers in the past two years. This is largely because of the sheer volume of work. No region can develop a consistent planning policy or deliver an adequate service with regard to following up unauthorised development and so on, without a consistency of personnel. I trust that with new time limits will come new bodies.
The national media debate gives the impression that our housing difficulties begin and end in Dublin. This is not so. House ownership remains an essential part of life for Irish people and in County Donegal, like everywhere else, we have good and bad records in realising that dream. Affordable housing and solutions for those looking to improve their lot are not yet present and possible existing solutions are fraught with difficulties. Those who have a site and are in a position to build must still acquire planning permission and this is becoming more and more complicated in our area, due to factors such as special areas of conservation, natural heritage areas and the issue of linear development. There has been an explosion of development in areas which had previously been quiet. For those willing to build but without a site, the problem is the escalating price of land. Our great advantages of a healthy environment and breathtaking scenery and our proximity to the large urban centre of Derry have become the greatest disadvantages to young couples wishing to build homes, because of the strong demand for holiday homes among people wishing to enjoy those very features. It is essential, given our difficulties in providing houses, that young people trying to set up home in their own locality should receive priority in terms of planning. In a time when our job creation level is poor and fishing and farming are becoming more challenging we should not add to the burdens of those who believe that the future can be brighter for our beautiful region.
I mention the frustrations of those on county council lists of housing schemes although that may have to be resolved at a local level. For those on the specific instance list there is a long list of criteria which effectively exclude single people and couples without children. These categories of people are so low on the priority list that they never get a chance despite being in possession of a site. Where can a single person go? If a single person is lucky enough to be selected there follows months of paper shifting between various offices – environment, health, planning, roads, housing and so on – which must send reports over and back. The appropriate level of staffing is not available for the number of cases being dealt with.
Once the local council offices become a reality in the new year these problems will be reduced and we all look forward to this. I congratulate the Donegal county manager and the county council for their initiative in moving to decentralise. They have led the way in this venture which has become a pilot for other counties. Decentralisation will bring services to the local communities and, in my area, will give a badly needed boost to the town of Carndonagh. While our county council meetings have followed the electoral area format for more than a year, the presence of the offices will make decentralisation a reality in the new millennium.
The Minister for the Environment and Local Government visited my area on his first official visit as Minister and he saw that the council had begun to acquire the finance to develop new housing schemes. I live in a town where there had been a 16 year gap between the last scheme and the recommencement of house building and Deputies can imagine the length of the list of people waiting for new houses. I trust that the finance continues to arrive for new developments and that council spending will be able to match the finance it is given. I hope the Minister will continue to consider releasing land for council housing which is becoming more and more difficult. There is also a great need for serviced sites.
In an ageing society, we should take a closer look at the granny flat concept and at supports offered to couples or elderly people to extend their homes to support other family members, thus taking them off the council housing list. I have many criticisms of the system of house repairs and extensions. I often come across situations where a small investment would leave a house in a much safer and healthier condition but where the applicant falls between existing schemes. Sometimes the investment needed to repair a house is prohibitive but the applicant does not want to leave it and the chance of qualifying for a specific instance house is unrealistic.
Central heating for the elderly presents another difficulty. I am unaware of any scheme which caters for it. Housing aid for the elderly is so underfunded that there is no scope to expand into heating, despite the fact that heat is one of the most basic needs of older people and one of the small comforts we can give to people who are often living alone and in need of such small comforts. While I praise the way the North Western Health Board gets value for money for its scheme, I feel the money it offers applicants does not meet their needs and there is a serious countrywide backlog for a scheme which is intended to supply basic urgent repairs.
I congratulate Action Inishowen, an organisation in my region, for its energy action programme which brought trainees into the homes of the elderly and insulated roofs, placed spy-holes and safety chains on doors and provided many other small but important improvements. I hope this organisation will be supported by the various agencies in running a second phase of the scheme and I hope the range of improvements they provide will be increased. Old people need to feel safe, snug and secure in their homes and this scheme has helped to see that they do so. The scheme is to be reviewed with a view to rationalising it and including areas currently unsupported. I ask the Minister to outline the current status of the review and its recommendations, if any.
I commend the Minister for the Environment and Local Government for the work being done under the guise of voluntary housing. This is true value in partnership. In my area I have watched various voluntary groups spend months pursuing dreams of housing schemes for those who need them most. The quality of the developments are second to none and are not, in any sense, ghettos or second-class options. I trust the support given to these groups will continue and, while accepting the need for a certain amount of bureaucracy, I hope the level of red tape will be kept to a minimum. I could speak about the need to improve the new house grant but that question has been debated long and hard many times. I hope it can be incorporated into a mortgage, given as a mortgage relief and improved significantly. It could be a kick start for many young people in taking on a financial commitment which they otherwise could not take on.
With regard to transport in north Donegal, I cannot argue about whether the train fare to Cork is cheaper than that to Limerick. This does not mean anything to me because we, in north Donegal, do not have a train service. I cannot argue about the air service from Dublin to Shannon, Kerry, Cork, Galway, Belfast or Derry because Donegal does not have an air service. The transport issue is vitally important to north Donegal. On a regular basis I am told that the tourism and business sectors suffer due to the peripheral and inaccessible nature of Donegal. Indeed, those of us who commute to work have our own thoughts on those two words. However, in a time of high unemployment and a lack of opportunities, this statement gains even more significance. The words "peripheral" and "inaccessible" are taken as the excuse for businesses not wanting to invest or locate in the region. To me, this is the easy option. It is a real opt-out clause. People in north Donegal in so many ways feel far from peripheral. They have worked for large companies, which have operated successfully for a number of years and which have been happy with the adjacent urban centre of Derry, the proximity of the port of Larne and the international airport in Antrim. Indeed, the Government provided support for the development of Derry City Airport, which was needed to enable a major airline to land large planes at this regional airport. This support has been important and it had a positive effect, which perhaps will take a little more time to appreciate, yet when I ask what role this has had for job creation, I find myself asking, "Are our agencies using this service to get business people into the north-west or are they returning to the old, more comfortable argument that until we have a Dublin-Derry service we will not really feel the benefit of a foreign itinerary coming into our region?"
In raising this issue I am aware it is outside the remit of the Minister's Department. However, the State agency which is responsible for job creation cites access as a major drawback. Therefore, in the context of transport, I ask what can be done to link Donegal to Dublin in the context of road, rail and air services?
We already have an airport in Derry which can accommodate planes of any size. There are regional airports all over the country which provide a social and economic service, often without making a profit. This ensures that most locations on this small island are only a short distance apart. Why, therefore, are we, in north Donegal, treated differently? Surely a person from Malin should have the same right of access to public transport as someone from Cork. That inequity is unacceptable.
There is already a rail link from Derry to Belfast and from Belfast to Dublin, but there is no direct service linking north Donegal with Dublin. Whether this is seen as an improvement of the existing line, a Donegal-Sligo-Dublin or a Letterkenny-Derry-Dublin service, there can be no argument regarding funding as it comes back to the same issue of the right of a Donegal person to the same entitlements as any other citizen of the Republic.
One person who is contributing to transport infrastructure in Donegal is the Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Deputy Woods, who is providing funding towards piers and harbours. He is providing for real change and making a positive impact on my county. There are opportunities opening up for car ferry links and everything seems to revolve around that particular transport sector.
To return to an aspect over which there is greater control, I raise the issue of the development of a corridor from north Donegal through Derry to Dublin. The Minister, Deputy Dempsey, and Lord Dubbs co-launched the north-west region cross-Border group transportation infrastructural study which, along with the Donegal task force initiative report of not that long ago, showed the consensus that exists in regard to what needs to be done. I need do no more than remind any Minister who has come up through Omagh of the joys of travelling on that route, the A5-N2. While many people do not seem to realise it, there are large urban centres to be served in the north-west and, just like the argument for the rail and air services, there is no excuse for any Government to ignore the infrastructural needs of a transport network.
For all the talk of an inability to achieve consensus on any matter relating to the North, this is not the case in relation to transport infrastructure as it pertains to us in the real north. We in the north-west, irrespective of political and social divides, never again want to hear the phrase "the poor relation" because this is what we feel like at present. We never want to see a map which shows red, black, yellow or green lines serving three quarters of the island, with a great void of white with no lines in the north-west. I trust that major and significant improvements will result from the national development plan and I await its publication.
As I stated at the outset, each of the topics under consideration today would merit a single debate in its own right and it is difficult to be all-embracing and to give adequate justice to planning, housing or transport in the time permitted, but there will be other opportunities to do so. I wish all the relevant Ministers well in the large range of important aspects which come under the remit of their Departments and congratulate them on the many initiatives and changes which they are bringing to their briefs.