I move:
That Dáil Éireann:
–noting that it will be necessary to build some 40 per cent more houses over the next ten years than currently exist;
–noting that current rates of house price increase represent a crisis for individual families and a serious threat to pay moderation and economic growth;
–noting the requirement to balance commercial and residential development to ensure that suburban developments contain office and commercial space as well as housing, and that centre city developments should contain a proportion of affordable housing so that traffic flows in both directions and transport facilities are used efficiently;
–noting the requirement to plan and develop new cities and centres of popu lation to redesign the physical shape of the country in order to ensure infrastructural problems are overcome in an environmentally sustainable way;
–noting that public transport is underfunded, underutilised and insufficiently competitive;
–noting that the planning process is now hopelessly slowed and deadlocked by objections to development and that some objections can best be overcome if the facilities to support new housing, such as roads, public transport, well-maintained play areas and childcare facilities are put in place at the same time as new houses;
–noting with concern the fact that some potential objectors to developments are either funded by competitors or are bought off by interested developers;
–noting the failure of the Government to produce a coherent national waste management plan which is central to any coherent national plan for housing;
–noting the failure of the Government to adequately address the traffic problem affecting all parts of the country;
is of the opinion that at current and foreseeable rates of growth in housing demand, Ireland is facing a housing and infrastructural crisis; and calls on the Government to tackle the looming housing and infrastructural crisis as a single project and to produce a national infrastructure and settlement plan which would decide future development patterns, to be under the aegis of the Department of the Taoiseach and be invigilated on a weekly basis by him, so that all our people are housed in places that are accessible to where they work.
I wish to share my time with Deputy Dukes.
It is clear that Ireland faces a major infrastructural crisis. One sees the evidence of this every morning and evening in our cities and towns as traffic is blocked up on the way to and from work. One also sees evidence of it in the queues of people outside auctioneers' offices, waiting for the opportunity to buy houses which are available at limited offer prices. I have every reason to believe that this will continue to get worse unless something is done about it. It requires politics and political action to change this position. I am not a visionary and I cannot foretell the future. However, I have an idea about how politics can influence the future for good or ill. If politics is to influence the future for good, three characteristics are required – predictability, efficiency and transparency.
One of the reasons for Ireland's current economic success is the predictability of our tax policies as they affect business. As the political parties in the House are agreed on basic corporation tax policy, changes in Government have not changed the business environment as far as tax is concerned. Few other European countries have that degree of predictability. Ireland's membership of the European Union has enhanced that predictability because it has set constraints on what this and other member state governments can do to change direction with regard to matters such as budget deficits, environmental regulation, competition policy, etc. Predictability is an important success factor for Ireland and we can be reasonably comfortable about it.
The second requirement for successful political action in the economic field is the promotion of efficiency. This is an area in which Ireland, particularly regarding the provision of infrastructure, has been deficient. Planning for the foreseeable growth in the number of people looking for houses has been particularly inadequate. The political system at governmental level between Departments and between Departments and local authorities has not coped adequately with the rapid, but foreseeable, increase in the demand for additional houses.
For every ten houses we have today, there is a need to provide an additional four in the next ten years. This is the biggest single construction project ever undertaken in the nation's history. It is truly the millennium project because no construction project of its size and proportion has been undertaken in this millennium. It is important that the provision of these additional houses and all the infrastructure necessary to support them is seen as a single project and not as a series of individual projects, some of which may be co-ordinated with others.
The traffic problem is a symptom of a disease and not the disease itself. The disease is the shortage of housing and this represents the fundamental underlying threat to Ireland's economic success. There is a need to put in place a national infrastructure and settlement plan which would be administered on a weekly basis by the Taoiseach to ensure that, over the next ten years, all the necessary infrastructure is provided to create houses for people which are affordable and capable of being lived in in a civilised way.
At present people are not living civilised lives. They must spend an increasing amount of time in their cars morning and evening because the only place in which they can afford to buy a house is far away from their place of work. Meanwhile, because of this extra traffic over longer distances at slower paces, inner city and suburban residents are facing a rapid deterioration in their lifestyles due to the increased use of their housing areas as short cuts by people avoiding traffic jams on the main arterial routes. Smaller suburban and inner city housing areas are now experiencing levels of through traffic for which they were never designed.
Travel times are becoming longer to and from work because in Dublin, in particular, it has been decided to have a low density suburbia with plenty of green space and few multi-storey buildings or high density housing. There are objections to any change in this position, but those who object fail to realise that the choice of having a low density city carries the cost of a consequent large traffic problem. This is because of the undermining of the economics of public transport by the low density choice that has been made.
The traffic problem will only be solved if the overall infrastructural problem is solved, in particular, the problem of housing and of servicing them with schools, bus, train and waste disposal services and all the other requirements, including child care, which are necessary for a civilised life. If houses are built far away from bus and train services, there will be traffic problems. If, as we are trying to do, more houses are built in outer suburbia or the edges of our cities without tackling the resultant waste disposal, schooling, road, footpath and other problems in advance, inevitably there will be objections from existing residents. They see that providing houses without services will worsen their lives and, therefore, they object and use the provisions of the planning Acts to the full.
We are now moving from having a not-in-my-back-yard culture to a BANNA culture – build absolutely nothing near anything. This is becoming the guiding principle. In the recent local elections, individuals were elected whose sole successful platforms were objecting to travellers' halting sites, new houses in a particular area or some other development which is necessary to house people, including the provision of means of incinerating waste. The willingness of people to use the electoral process to pull up the ladder after themselves once they are safely ensconced in a house and forget about the needs of others increased considerably in the recent election. This is a matter of concern, but it only happened because the political process has shown weakness. It has been unwilling to give leadership in these matters.
Political responsibility is thinly dispersed among so many local authorities and councillors who act individually in each case without any sense of a county government, similar to a national Government, making decisions on a county wide basis. This dispersal of political authority and absence of political planning has left the field open to those for whom objection, motivated by personal and selfish interests, is an increasing way of life and of asserting one's individuality and existence in an area. Due to the lack of political authority and planning, an objector culture is developing. This bodes ill for our ability to undertake successfully in the time required the major construction project which is needed to provide four houses for every ten which currently exist to meet the foreseeable housing need.
Due to the haphazard nature of our infrastructural planning, our existing buses, trains and roads are being used inefficiently. There is a need to change the shape of our cities, not in terms of the overall shape of the city but in the sense of having more businesses located in the suburbs and more residences in the inner city so that traffic is in both directions in the morning and evening. If there are places of work in the suburbs and some people living in the cities, people will travel outwards in the morning and inwards in the evening, in addition to people travelling in the opposite direction. That will allow buses, trains and roads to be used more optimally. It is important that we continue seeking to ensure that residential accommodation be a requirement in all inner city developments, and that office and other business accommodation be a requirement in outer city housing developments.
We also need to take decisions not only to build satellite towns around Dublin but to establish other cities as alternative poles of development. Places like Dundalk, Athlone, Carlow and Thurles should be developed around their proposed or existing third level institutions with a view to possible city status.
It is a matter of great importance that we have a national plan which takes these sorts of strategic decisions. From my experience of the introduction of Operation Freeflow, I do not believe we can afford to leave the physical planning task to the Department of the Environment and Local Government on its own. I mean no disrespect to the Minister, Ministers of State or officials of the Department. Its brief is simply too narrow – it does not encompass education, law enforcement, traffic enforcement, child care or many other areas inherent in a successful human infrastructure development plan. Nor does the Department have the authority to decide on the physical shape of the country – it has a contribution to make but it does not have the overall political authority.
That is why we need a plan led by the Taoiseach. Operation Freeflow was introduced solely because I as Taoiseach took a personal interest in the matter. I brought all the relevant traffic authorities – law enforcement, public transport, other facility provisions, etc. – together for lunch in the Taoiseach's office, told them I would meet them again for lunch a month later, and demanded to see results within that time. Things which had not happened, and were not due to happen for years, all happened within the space of that month, simply because the Taoiseach was involved and these people had to report back.
Without making false claims for my abilities in this regard, this is an example of how the Department of the Taoiseach ought to be used to deal with strategic problems in Government. The housing shortage is a strategic problem facing us and is the main contributor to the traffic problem and other factors leading to the deterioration of lifestyle in our society. We must deal quickly with this problem.
In the context of the objector culture to which I referred, I have noticed a deplorable practice in my constituency, which undoubtedly occurs elsewhere also. A cement plant was to be built but a competitor who operated another such plant financed the cost of objectors to the proposed plant; and those proposing the cement plant paid what they called "goodwill money" to objectors, who then withdrew their objections. I regard this as corruption. Politicians have as much or as little influence on the planning process as do objectors, because neither of those groups makes the decisions. If politicians had received or paid such money we would be immediately accused of corruption.
It is corrupt for a company to pay people to object to a competitor's proposal. It is also corrupt for a developer to pay people to withdraw their objections. In both cases the actions materially affect the course of decision making. It could be argued that the decision is taken not by the objector or the developer but by someone else, but in business time is money and if a development can be delayed for a sufficiently long time – in one case objectors used the court as a further delaying tactic, after the planning appeals board had made its decision – that is as good as killing it. People who finance or buy off objectors are, therefore, corrupt in any understandable meaning of the term, and this corruption must be stopped if the bottlenecks in our society to which I referred are to be overcome.
