I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time".
This Bill is a Bill to amend the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963. The principal purpose of the Bill is to provide that some authority or person who is concerned not merely with private profit and private gain will, in the interests of the community, have a look at a proposal to demolish certain types of buildings in our cities and towns. The type of buildings that we propose in the Bill should be the subject of this objective consideration are buildings of aesthetic, historic and architectural interest. We do not say that every building should come within the ambit of this Bill. What we do say, however, is that buildings of the kind to which I have referred and which are what one might call the ordinary buildings one finds in the streets of our towns and cities should not be demolished upon the say-so of some speculator or some company who want to demolish these buildings for the purpose of building offices and gaining from such a transaction.
A second purpose of the Bill is to prevent the demolition of buildings which are habitable. We are all aware of the dimensions and severity of the housing shortage all over the country. I believe it is not right or proper, when there is an acute housing shortage, when many people are living in cramped housing conditions, and when young families and young married people suffer the tensions and anxieties of living with in-laws or in unsuitable accommodation, to allow the indiscriminate demolition of buildings that can be made habitable. I have seen around the city of Dublin shacks which have been constructed by Dublin Corporation for the purpose of housing our citizens and, at the same time, we have seen in various parts of the city of Dublin perfectly good houses which have been inhabited by families, by one family or as multiple dwellings, converted into flats or bedsitters, which have been demolished. Of course the effect of every demolition means further pressure upon our limited stock of suitable houses.
The Seanad should express its concern for those who are living in bad housing conditions by enacting this Bill to prevent the indiscriminate demolition of houses which could otherwise be made available for human habitation. I think it is quite true to say that it is the person whom the shoe pinches who really squeals and I feel that the present Government, and perhaps it is true to say the country as a whole, do not realise the continuous suffering, privation and mortification which far too many families undergo because of the acute housing shortage. It seems to me a scandal and almost criminal that on the one hand, we have a housing shortage and on the other, that perfectly good habitable houses are demolished upon the "say-so" of some foreign or Irish speculator. It does not matter what his nationality is.
In this country we do not possess a great deal of material wealth but we do have some things to offer. We have some fine buildings that have commanded the admiration of our own people and of foreign visitors. We have seen in various parts of the city of Dublin that private interests and private greed have demolished buildings. We see the yawning gaps that have been created for the purpose of forcing the town planning authority to give permission to build other kinds of buildings in order to fill up the gaps. The modus operandi at the present time seems to be that you may not be able in advance to get planning permission for the type of buildings you want to build but you will certainly get it much more readily if you demolish the buildings because you cannot leave the yawning gap in a street or terrace indefinitely. In this way pressure is put on the planning authority and on appeal, on the Minister for Local Government, to give permission to erect the type of building which the demolishers have in mind.
The Local Government Planning and Development Act of 1963 is an Act which has the most far-reaching consequences for virtually every citizen in this State. It applies to anybody who owns any kind of property, whether it is snipe grass or property in St. Stephen's Green. There is virtually nothing that one can do nowadays in relation to any property that does not require permission under the Act The wide scope of the Act was responsible for the insertion in the Long Title of a reference to the common good. There are so many restrictions placed upon the use of property, the development of property, even the change of use of property, by this planning Act that it seems that the draftsmen thought it well to invoke the common good as a justification for the kind of interference and restrictions that the Act would inevitably impose upon all property owners and those who wanted to acquire property.
So it is that in the Long Title the Act is described as
an Act to make provision in the interests of the common good for the proper planning and development of cities, towns and other areas, whether urban or rural (including the preservation and improvement of the amenities thereof).
The common good required the intervention of this Act in the view of the Legislature and I insist that the common good requires that there should be some restraint on the licensed demolition which was subsequently provided under regulations made by the Minister for Local Government in accordance with the legal provisions of the Act but certainly not in accordance with the spirit of the Act. It is for that reason that I say that the Bill aims at getting some person concerned with the common good, with the interests of the community, to take a look at proposals to demolish certain types of buildings in our cities and towns.
The Act in its operation has given rise to a great deal of unrest and criticism, and that among supporters of the Fianna Fáil Party no less than supporters of the Fine Gael Party or any other Party. People have been surprised by the sweep and variety of powers which have been vested in planning authorities under the Act and have been dismayed to find that the individual citizen has so little recourse, so little recourse by way of appeal, to restrain the planning authorities in the exercise of their powers. It is quite true to say that there is an appeal provided by the Act to the Minister for Local Government but it is equally true to say that no Minister for Local Government, however endowed with intelligence, however endowed with the virtue of hard work, could possibly devote his mind individually to the number of appeals that come before him in any year. The Minister must necessarily act on advice tendered to him. Equally one might say that that is the position in regard to the regulations which are made and which were made under the Act when it came into operation. The present Minister can well claim to be exculpated from the charges which it is necessary to make about the planning and development exemption regulations which were made under the Act. I shall come to those in a minute.
In order to consider this Bill, it is necessary to have a look at the manner in which the Local Government Planning and Development Act, 1963, is framed. The Act is concerned with planning and development and any person wanting to find out what development meant would turn to section 3 which defines "development" as the carrying out of any works on, in or under land or the making of any material change in the use of any structures or other land. "Works" is defined in subsection (2) as any act or operation of construction, excavation, demolition, extension, alteration, repair or renewal. It is significant that the description of "Works" embraces equally the construction, alteration or extension of a premises or property with demolition, so that in the eyes of the Legislature when it was passing the 1963 Act, I think Members of both Houses of the Oireachtas would have regarded themselves as attributing the same importance to demolition as they would to extension, alteration or repair.
The Act of 1963 gave power to the Minister to exempt certain developments from the requirement to obtain planning permission and again I think it would be fair to say that Members of both Houses of the Oireachtas who looked at this would have thought that the exemptions concerned the fringe areas of development and that the fringe might be related to works but less important elements in relation to either construction, excavation, demolition, alteration or renewal. It would be fair to say that if anybody had directed his mind to the type of regulation the Minister would make, exempting certain works and developments, he would have said: "It is a minor alteration or extension of a house. That is the kind of thing that can be exempted. If it is the construction of walls around a house to a normal level, again there would be no requirement to seek planning permission and equally in relation to repairs, such as putting in a new window or doors or the erection of a chimney stack, it would be right, proper and sensible that such construction work or repair would not have to be made the subject of an application to the planning authority for permission."
But I am quite certain that nobody in either House of the Oireachtas would have thought that one whole aspect of development included in the term "works", that is to say, demolition, would have been the subject of a complete exemption as is provided for in the statutory instrument, the regulations made under subsection (4), which has this horrible title "Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963 (Exempted Development) Regulations, 1964." Nobody would ever have thought that the extensions, for instance, could be the subject of an exemption regulation because extensions are equally as important as alterations; but what, in fact, has happened is that while the legislature and both Houses of the Oireachtas in 1963, when the Act was being enacted, specifically provided that demolition of premises, equally with extensions and alterations, was a proper matter for planning and development permission, nobody could have thought that the whole area of demolition could have been the subject of exemption as was the case under the regulations to which I have referred, it would have been such an enormous error to have included demolition in an exemption regulation, but what, in fact, we find is that demolition, which is the subject of a specific definition or is part of a definition in the Act, is concealed in a regulation where nobody would expect to find it; and I think it must be said that this concealment was deliberate, and if not deliberate, was the worst possible form of drafting that anybody could be guilty of.
Nobody looking at these planning and development regulations and seeing that there was a schedule with small print would ever have thought that in these regulations demolition was provided for in one of the classes in the schedule. The schedule is brought into operation by Article 3 of the regulations:
Subject to sub-article (5) of this article, development of each class specified in column 1 of Part I of the Schedule of these Regulations shall be exempted development for the purposes of the Act, provided such development complies with the limitations specified in the said column 1 in relation to that class and with the condition specified in column 2 of the said Part I opposite the mention of that class in the said column 1.
When one is thinking in terms of development, I rather think that is a positive act: one is thinking in terms of construction, alteration, renewal or improvement but reading an instrument of this kind, I personally would be inclined to think of demolition as development. It seems to be the antithesis of development or part of development. Under the Act it is included as development. From the point of view of the layman, I think nobody would regard demolition as not being development, but what happens under the regulations is that the matters exempted from development are set out in various classes. The first one concerns the extension of a dwellinghouse by any addition to the rear thereof, provided the original floor area is not exceeded by more than 120 square feet and that the height is not exceeded. Straight away one would think that was a reasonable exemption.
There are others in relation to construction of walls, television aerials and things of that kind and then in class 7 we read:
An alteration consisting of the plastering or painting of any external part of any building.
That is fair enough.
or the demolition of any building.
One would certainly think that the demolition of any building would be put into a class of its own, that it would not be included in a class that dealt with plastering or painting any external part of the building and that the manner of phrasing in relation to this class was especially misleading— whether deliberate or bad drafting I do not know but whoever is responsible for it can take his pick. The wording continues:
save where the preservation of such building is an objective of any development plan or, during the period prior to the making of a development plan, is declared by resolution of a planning authority to be an objective which they propose to include in a development plan.
That is the warrant. Class 7 of this regulation is the warrant of any speculator to demolish any building he likes, no matter how much the public may wish to have it preserved or how much it ought to be preserved in the interests of the community and I think it was a mistake and a grave error to have put it into the regulation in that way. I know the Minister will say that under the new town plan provided for Dublin and other cities and towns which will come into operation on 1st October, 1967, certain buildings will be isolated as being necessary and desirable to preserve for the purpose of the plan. That may be so. That is again as far as the type of building we are talking about is concerned but there is a whole range of other buildings which will not be the objective of any development plans made under this Act of 1963. There are a lot of those buildings which ought to be the subject of an objective appraisal as to their worth and value before they are demolished.
As I said already, there are some buildings which in any event because of the present housing crisis ought not be demolished pending an increase in our stock of houses. Therefore, this Bill while its effect will not be very great to some extent in the case of those buildings that are objectives of preservation in the development plans made, will continue until such time as the housing crisis has been resolved.
Let there be no mistake about this, that the threat to most of the buildings and most of the houses comes from those who want to build big, expensive luxury blocks of flats and big office buildings. As far as my information goes, there are blocks of luxury flats in this city which have not been inhabited because the economic rents are so high. There are just no tenants prepared to pay the high rents the speculators find it necessary to charge in order to get the returns they want on their investments. There has been altogether too much development of that kind of luxury flats and office buildings and too little of the development of flats for the ordinary man in the street.
The Bill has been framed in a manner, let me say quite frankly, I would not approve of. I do not like, and I condemned it before, the drafting of Bills by reference to other pieces of legislation, but I have not got, nor has any other Member of this House got, the resources which are available to Ministers of State. I would have this Bill drafted, if I had available to me the resources which a Minister of State has, in a manner which I would like. The Bill certainly is quite clear in what it does.
Under the Exempted Development Regulations, to which I have already referred, certain classes of buildings are defined. The first is an industrial building which means a structure, not being a shop, or a structure in or adjacent to and belonging to a quarry or mine used for the carrying on of any industrial process. We do not intend that the demolition of those buildings should be subjected to planning authorities. There are light industrial buildings which mean, industrial buildings, not being special industrial buildings in which the processes carried on or the machinery installed are such as could be carried on or installed in any residential area without detriment to the amenity of that area by reason of noise, vibration, smell, fumes, smoke, soot, ash, dust or grit. A general industrial building means an industrial building which is not a light industrial building or a special industrial building. A special industrial building means an industrial building used for one or more of the purposes specified in classes 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Part IV of the Schedule to these regulations.
We are saying in the Bill, and we say it quite clearly in paragraph 2, that the Minister should not be entitled to make regulations exempting from the necessity to obtain planning permission if those buildings are buildings other than an industrial buildings, light industrial building, general industrial building or special industrial building. In other words, you exclude from the scope of the Bill, or rather you include within the Bill all buildings except those industrial buildings, light industrial buildings and so on and these in the main will be the ordinary houses in our streets, towns, squares, promenades and terraces and will, I think, meet the purposes which I and the other sponsors of the Bill have in mind in trying to preserve for our own enjoyment and for posterity those buildings of an architectural and aesthetic quality.
It is also correct to say that the wholesale demolition of buildings which has been going on without any let or hindrance from any public authorities has caused a great deal of public concern and there has been a good deal of correspondence in the papers about it. There has been a good deal said in speeches by different societies condemning this unbridled or permitted demolition of buildings in the manner in which it has occurred.
A good test oftentimes of people's sincerity is the extent to which they are prepared to suffer financially for the views they hold. In this connection it is right and proper to refer to the fact that a group of architects in the city of Dublin—I am not certain I can lay my hand on the reference at the moment—but certainly quite a number of responsible and respectable architects in this country have recommended to their members that they ought not be a party to any assignment which involves the demolition of the type of buildings which we say ought to be preserved. When you get professional people whose incomes are going to be affected by a voluntarily imposed ban of this kind doing this it is a test of their sincerity and a test of the rightness of the cause which they and others are espousing.
I hope that what is becoming fashionable nowadays, in my experience, the practice of bringing over from London Sir Somebody, who is an architect, or some foreign architect, to lend some authority to proposals to demolish certain buildings and to erect different kinds of offices and blocks of flats, will not be adopted by companies in this country who have to demolish buildings. I hope that the commendable professional integrity displayed by architects will not result in an influx of foreign architects to the detriment of the way of life of Irish architects.
I know the Minister for Local Government has been anxious to be present at this debate. Personally, I think he is free from any blame for the regulations which have been framed. As I said, I know of his interest to be present at this debate. I trust that he will urge the House, or will join with us in urging the House, to accept this Bill. There may be amendments which will require to be made. I do not think these are likely to be very far-reaching. Certainly if they are necessary, I am quite sure we will be quite anxious to accept them. I also hope that if it comes to that we will have available to us the expertise and skill of the Minister's staff in the framing of these amendments.
