I would like to make other points before I make the presentation. Another question asked was whether the manager advised us against adopting the plan. Again, Mr. Walsh said that the Minister advised us against adopting the plan. That is not true, but I do not blame Mr. Walsh for that because he was not at the meeting. The manager made recommendations, most of which, as Deputy Flynn pointed out, we accepted. We rejected a very small number of them. At no stage on the final adoption of the plan did the manager intervene to say that he must advise us against adopting the plan.
Many questions were asked by Members of the Oireachtas today — we are greatly encouraged by the number of Oireachtas Members who attended — about meetings between the Minister or his officials and ourselves as elected members. No such meetings ever took place. At every one of our meetings we suggested that the Minister should enter into dialogue with us because we have always recognised that the debate on rural housing has been hijacked by extremists on both sides, people who want houses built everywhere and the planners who, in our view, and perhaps it is incorrect, only want them built in towns and cities.
In an interview with a lady who is present in the Gallery, the news editor of The Western People, the Minister confirmed that he wanted to engage in dialogue with the members of Mayo County Council long before we adopted the plan, but such a meeting never took place.
There are four weeks between a council adopting a plan and it becoming an effective legal document. Why did the Minister not do anything in those four weeks in terms of talking about his problems with our plan? Why did he allow a further six weeks to pass in which applications for planning permission were adjudicated on the basis of a plan he has now rejected? That is a valid question and it is an issue in which the committee might be interested.
Many of the Oireachtas Members spoke about consultation and a number of them pleaded for consultation, even at this late stage. Last Sunday's The Sunday Business Post carried an article in which I and others were quoted. An unnamed source, a senior official in the Department, is quoted in the paper as saying they would come to this meeting but there would be no further meetings between us and the Department. That is serious.
I wish I had not prepared a presentation. I am so exercised by what has gone on, it has thrown me somewhat. We are aware of the amount of documentation that has come to the committee already from the official side. Members have almost been choked with it. We are aware of the format of these types of meetings. We prepared a PowerPoint presentation but it is not feasible to make it. There is a copy in each member's pack and I ask them to look at it in their own time.
The main reason we have gone to this extreme of making such a comprehensive presentation to the committee is that we appreciate this opportunity but, more importantly and because it is necessary, we want to show the thoroughness, commitment and effort the 31 members of Mayo County Council put into this project. The CD concentrates, to a considerable extent, on the beauty of the county, our pride as elected members in it and our reluctance to do anything that would damage in the slightest way such a beautiful county, one of the most beautiful in this beautiful country.
I believe it was Deputy Ring who referred to this point. We went to the extreme of putting our hands in our pockets to pay for independent expert advice. We are, therefore, very hurt, and rightly we consider, by the contents of a letter most members will have received from the Minister in respect of their representations on our behalf. He used phrases in it such as, "ignoring expert advice", "I find it difficult to [understand] the ... rationale [of these people]" and "I hoped [for common] sense". I do not believe that the effort we have put into this deserves those kinds of comments. It adds to the elitist position taken specifically by planners about county councillors. Although I am not saying that any of them are to be found in our county, throughout the country there is a perception that county councillors are buffoons who know nothing.
We conducted a poll on a website to test the popularity or otherwise of the Minister's directive in the case of Mayo County Council, the details of which are in the packs circulated to members. The results of the poll do not matter. Some 70% were against what he was going, 29% were for it and 1% did not care what he did.
An e-mail was circulated. It is interesting that practically none of the e-mail addresses contained in the e-mail is traceable as many of them were "Gmail", "hotmail" and other strange words. The e-mail requested people to answer "Yes" to the survey on the website below and forward it to anyone from Mayo and then it is stated in bold print "retarded Mayo councillors". We suspect, although we have no proof, that this emanated from people in or associated with planning in Ireland.
The Chairman will be interested in this point as he shares the same constituency as the person concerned. Last Sunday, a well-known journalist wrote the following few sentences:
Decent though they are, Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny both inherited their Dáil seats from their fathers ... Still tied to the parish pump where the publican, the doctor and the biggest farmers hold the handle, they are drifting further and further from the new country [all around them].
It is worth taking the time to put in context the atmosphere in which we operate vis-à-vis so-called experts.
I will speak a little more about the experts. I read the minutes of the meeting during which the committee decided to invite us to attend before it. I again repeat our thanks for that. The Chairman rightly expressed concerns about inviting representatives of every council that had a problem with its development plan to appear before the committee. I and, I believe, all my colleagues understand that. This is not a matter of the usual row a council can have with a Minister. The issue in the case of Waterford County Council concerned the zoning of a particular piece of ground. In Monaghan County Council the issue concerned the zoning of lands that were subject to flooding.
This issue is not about zoning lands to enhance any developer and make somebody very rich. It is ridiculous in the extreme for any logical people to suggest that by zoning and freeing up land, it will encourage 79,000 people — that is the figure used in the Minister's letter sent to Deputies — to rush into County Mayo. There is no evidence of that ever having happened. Long before there were these restrictions, that did not happen and it will not happen now. If we thought it would, we would not have gone down this road. It is not about party politics or one party trying to upstage the other. We have 100% unanimous support for our plan.
Many points were made today with which we entirely agree. A speaker said that this is about the notion of one size fits all. That concept of one size fits all is used in a television advertisement where one can see how ridiculous this philosophy can be when a fellow with a spanner can hardly get in the door because the spanner is so big.
On every issue there is room for debate and for alternative opinions to be expressed inside and outside every Department, but the Chairman has the unique honour of chairing a committee for a Department that has one bible. It is as infallible as the one written by the gospel writers. There is no room for any dissension, view or discussion. We have used, much to the annoyance of the senior people in the Department, existing Government policies to draft our plan because we were well advised. We had engaged planners.
Our hopes for today are to point out some errors. In straightforward, simple terms, they are wrong. We hope to highlight some consequences of the Minister's decisions. We want to pose a few questions and appeal to the committee to try to find some way to resolve this dispute.
There are two key issues on which the Minister has found our development plan out of order and unacceptable. The first is that the plan fails to take proper account of the national spatial strategy. I would like to give three quotations from an individual who worked on the expert advisory group advising the Minister on the drafting of the national spatial strategy. It is difficult to believe that somebody working on the committee could find such a different view from what the Minister is saying. The source is Professor Emeritus Séamus Caufield, a man with a huge reputation for accuracy in any of his assessments of any documents. He said:
The growth of the gateways and hubs is not an end in itself and is not so stated in the NSS. Neither is the achievement of target population by 2020 seen as essential or likely in many cases and there is no mention that population growth should be channelled into the hubs.
I was amused to see one of the members of the previous delegation frown and shake his head when the phrase "herding of people" was used in the presentation. The words "focused development" is much nicer language. It is the same thing.
Moving on to the second quotation, Professor Caulfield said:
What he is proposing and has formulated in his wording to replace P/CCC*2.2.2 is in direct contravention of the strategy for small towns and villages as set out on pp 107/8 of the National Spatial Strategy.
He is either completely wrong or he is not. It is a black and white statement.
The third quotation is:
The Minister is ordering the prioritising of development in the hub by demanding the withholding and phased release of zoned land in other towns throughout the county. By refusing to release lands in other towns the explicit aim is to force people into the hub.
We say "herd" people into the hub, so now we have three different descriptions.
I now wish to deal with the facts of the matter. The national spatial strategy has an expectation that hub towns, or the link hub in the case of Mayo, would reach a target population of 30,000 by 2020. In Mayo, the population of Ballina had reached 22,300 by 2006, leaving a shortfall of 7,700 to be made up in the following 14 years. As the population of the hub grew by over 5,000 in the decade from 1996, the target is clearly achievable without any intervention by the Minister.
Deputy Brady is from County Meath. I believe he is from Kells, which is ten or 11 miles from Navan. Navan has not been fortunate enough to have been declared a hub town. If all we get for Mayo from the designation of Ballina and Castlebar as a hub is further restriction on where and how people can live, we will gladly do without hub status. We have got absolutely nothing else. In the development plan that has been thrown back in our faces we had an aspiration that, as the third largest town in the county, we should facilitate the growth of Westport as a natural extension of the hub. We were told to throw that out; it was not allowed. I mentioned Deputy Brady. How would he like it if Navan was a hub town and the county development plan did not allow the development of Kells until this magic figure was achieved in Navan? Really, Chairman, what we are up against is daftness of the worst order.
The national spatial strategy is almost exclusively an urban-based strategy, and most of its targets were arrived at from this viewpoint. It gave only token consideration to the issue of rural housing and rural decline. Many of its aims have been achieved or are no longer either relevant or desirable. Much of the strategy needs updating, especially in so far as it never adequately examined or addressed the problem of rural decay, which is rampant not just in Mayo but throughout the country. As locally-elected councillors, we had no input into the national spatial strategy. Having to slavishly rubber-stamp that strategy renders any county development plan nothing more than an implementation of central government policy rather than local government policy. If this is the case, why bother with the pretence that locally-elected councillors have the right to draft local development plans?
Sustainable rural housing is the second reason the Minister has said he does not like the plan. The word "sustainable" is used all the time. Has any member ever seen in legislation or in a document a definition of the word? When I mention the powers of the Minister it might strike a bell. There is no definition for the word. Later, I will discuss the powers of the Minister. There was a map in the draft development plan which showed areas under serious urban pressure. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the map was not and could not have been evidence-based, words that were used repeatedly in the earlier presentations. How often this evening have members heard the words "evidence-based"?
It was not and could not have been evidence-based at the time it was drawn up. Even now, with more up-to-date figures available, the map is seriously inaccurate. For example, the hinterlands of Swinford and Ballyhaunis have recorded population loss but are shown in the map as being under strong urban pressure. Even in areas much closer to Castlebar, similar results have emerged. The population of Balla increased from 1,182 in 1996 to 1,362 in 2006, a gain of 180. However, since the town of Balla increased from 316 to 586 in this period, it means the hinterland of Balla town declined by 90 over this period. Despite this, the hinterland of Balla is classified as "under strong urban pressure". This evening the members of the committee were told that nothing we did was evidence-based and that anything being inserted in place of our crazy stuff was evidence-based. When members have time to ask us questions, they will get answers to those comments.
I have spoken for longer than intended. Deputy Flynn mentioned things that were in the plan when she was there that worked fine but which we have now been instructed to take out. In the submission, members of the committee will see examples of items the Minister has told Mayo County Council to remove from the plan. It is frightening. I have dealt with the quotations from Professor Caulfield but I will refer to two further quotations. The then Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Martin Cullen, at the launch of the draft guidelines on rural housing said the following:
We have a long tradition in Ireland of people living in rural areas. About one third of our people overall live in the countryside, with a much higher proportion than that in some parts of the country, especially in parts of the midlands and west. [It is 63% in Mayo and 91% in Leitrim.] People will continue to live in rural areas for the foreseeable future. [I doubt that they will if the present philosophy is allowed to take hold. This is not a battle for Mayo but a battle for every rural county in Ireland.] We owe it to rural communities to support the future vibrancy of all areas.
Some members might remember the former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern. He said:
In publishing the national spatial strategy we have sent out a clear signal that the traditional settlement pattern of rural Ireland is something we value and should be developed. The traditional loyalties to townland, parish and county have been a binding force in Ireland over the past 100 years and have been a major motivational force in social and economic development. The growth of our towns and cities, which is very welcome, should not be at the expense of rural areas.
Compare that with the herding of people from every corner of Mayo into Ballina and Castlebar. When the population there reaches 30,000, there will be another look at what the council intends to do.
I mentioned sustainability earlier. Section 31, the part of the Act that is being used against us in Mayo, states that where the Minister considers that any development plan fails to set out an overall strategy, he can invoke it. We have received three sets of legal opinion and I will quote from all three. The expression "the Minister considers" means it is not necessary that it is objectively established that he is correct, but merely that the Minister is of that view. Contrast this with the requirement of councillors. We got all kinds of warnings in Mayo about what would happen if we did not follow the direction. We were asked if we had considered this plan, took account of it and had regard to it. The 31 councillors elected in Mayo must meet strict criteria as to what we do or do not do, whereas the Minister only needs to have a view. This committee must examine the Planning and Development Act.
Another section states that the Minister can assert that a county development plan fails to take proper account of the national spatial strategy. The legal opinion is that it is not necessary that it is established that the Minister is correct in this view. The section states that the Minister must give stated reasons for his direction. According to our legal opinion, however, the section does not specify the extent of such reasons and the requirement to give reasons does not involve a requirement to give a discursive judgment.
One of the opinions summarised it by stating:
Section 31 operates as a stark repatriation of power to the Minister. It is striking for the absence of any appeal process, the absence of any meaningful test before the Minister is available to invoke it and the absence of any temporal limits on the Minister to restructure the development plan.
I will now hand over to my colleague, Councillor Al McDonnell. Our presentation contains a petition signed by 31 local representatives who were elected by the Mayo electorate. We are very upset and annoyed because we feel that we have been wrongly portrayed as irresponsible, but nothing could be further from the truth. We appeal to the committee to use whatever influence it has to have this issue in Mayo addressed and resolved for the benefit of many more counties.