Cuirim fáilte aireach roimh an mBille seo. Níl mé cinnte go bhfuil gach rud atá sa Bhille i gceart. Tá roinnt fadhbanna agam leis freisin. I give a cautious welcome to the Bill. I recognise what it is attempting to do but I want to raise a couple of issues with the Minister of State. The first one is something I raise in general about legislation, which is a drafting issue. It is not specific to planning legislation. When the Bill becomes an Act, if a citizen tries to read it, almost every single section describes an amendment to either the Planning and Development Act 2000 or the 2024 Act, which means that this Act will not be legible without also having copies of those two Acts. That makes it very difficult for any citizen to penetrate. It is not unique to this legislation. It is something that we do as a matter of course in this House but I think it is bad practice. We should be able to pick up the law and read it and have an idea of what it says. Even in the description of the sections it does not tell us what the amendment is supposed to do. It just says it is an amendment to section 38 of the 2000 Act, or whatever it might be. It would be much more constructive, in the first instance, to say what that amending section is supposed to do but, second, to take the section that is being amended, repeal it and restate it in the legislation so it is there for everyone to read. It is a simple thing that we could do as a general practice in this House but we do not. That is obviously a drafting point that will get exactly no traction with anyone outside this House but it is pertinent to this legislation because one of the aims here is apparently to improve clarity, if the explanatory memorandum and the bumpf around this is to be believed. It is a simple thing. Generally speaking, the aims of the Bill are clear and well placed. It makes perfect sense to me to increase the Housing Finance Agency's statutory borrowing limit to €15 billion. I do not have a difficulty with that. I wonder if maybe we should index link these limits rather than coming back every few years to change them in an amending piece of legislation. We could save ourselves the hassle if we just linked the limit to an index that allowed it to increase accordingly every year. I also agree with the comments that have been made about apartment sizes. We cannot win on this in some respects because on the one hand we have people telling us that in order to make projects viable, they have to reduce the unit size in order to make them easier to build. I get that but I honestly find it difficult to understand how developers cannot make a profit in the current environment with house prices and rental prices where they are. It is difficult to understand how when it was profitable to build the same thing a number of years ago, even taking into account the increasing cost of materials, etc., it cannot be built in a profitable way even at the standards we had before. I am not sure that the reduction in building standards and the size of apartments is the answer. I live in an apartment of less than 80 m sq. It is not a bad place to live or anything like that but the more we reduce the size the less livable the space becomes. That is increasingly true if we have families in that space, especially larger families with more children. Irish people have not got their heads around the notion that we can live in apartments perfectly comfortably. One of the mistakes we have made in this jurisdiction in terms of apartment living is that in a three-bedroom apartment, for example, there is only one reception room or one living space. If you have in that space two or three kids - anybody who has two or three kids will be familiar with this notion - one space can be very difficult and it is not built for harmonious family living. Maybe changing the attitude to what a family dwelling looks likes in terms of the layout of it will be an important thing. I also welcome the move to ten-year county development plans. The existing structure means that almost as soon as the last one is finished, we are looking at preparations for the next one so I think a ten-year period is more reasonable. I would favour much greater powers for elected councillors. Again, this is something I have complained about to the Minister of State. I complained about it to him when we were both councillors, never mind when he became Minister of State in the Department of housing. We do not give nearly enough power or credit to councillors. They are the hardest working elected people in this country, yet they have no resources but worse than that, they have no powers. The reality is that most councillors around the country, be they city or county councillors, are effectively local ambassadors to the chief executive of a given local authority or the director of services. In real terms, decisions are made at local government level by unelected officials who are not accountable to the local population, who will never knock on the door of a local resident and ask them what they think about the development plan or whatever issue it is, and who do not actually have their feet on the ground the way councillors do. Councillors are doing this all the time. They are knocking on doors. They are at residents' meetings and public meetings. They are available to people and they hear people's views all the time. In my view they are much better equipped to make decisions for the people they represent than officials who are answerable really only to the Custom House or to the Department of local government. We have the least powerful and most centralised local government system in the whole of the European Union. We should change that. Changing it is a vote of confidence in the fact that at local level, we have genuinely competent, capable, responsible, hardworking elected representatives and we should be devolving power to them, particularly when it comes to planning. We all know that in the 1990s, there was a certain small cohort of councillors who misbehaved and acted in a criminal fashion in some instances. I understand why when we got to the year 2000 that the law had to be changed to take planning decisions out of the hands of councillors because they had been misused and we had to re-establish confidence in planning decisions but the world has changed a lot since 2000. The level of accountability, scrutiny and regulation of councillors has massively changed. It was our party that set up many of those changes in how we require people to be accountable, in terms of their behaviour, their conflicts of interest, moneys they receive, donations, fundraising, all of that stuff. That has been completely changed. We now have the Standards in Public Office Commission whose sole job is to regulate politicians in terms of that behaviour. It is important to have this debate in the context of this legislation. We should now be looking at returning to a situation where we are giving decision-making powers about local planning back to councillors rather than constantly leaving it in the hands of officials who are not accountable. At the moment we have a massive democratic deficit in terms of planning decisions that is unique in the context of the European Union because councillors are not making planning decisions. In fact, when I was a councillor, I avoided ringing planners about issues because I did not want to be seen to be interfering in that process when, actually, I should have been the one making the decision. I am not a professional planner but we used to have planning committees that were advised by professional planners and we had the benefit of all that expertise. If the decision to be made is to be a democratic one, it should be made by democratically elected people and should reflect the democratic will of the people in a given area. That is a broader point than the legislation before us but it is important given this is planning and development legislation. I will turn to what I think is probably the main impetus of this legislation, which is about the reform of the judicial review in the planning process. Again, in broad terms, I welcome this. I recognise that Gabriel Makhlouf, the Governor of the Central Bank, said last year that the number one problem in housing development delivery was planning - not financing or other things but planning for the provision of local amenities and utilities. That is a fair criticism. It is far too slow. I recognise also that in Dublin, for example, at the moment there are 9,562 houses being delayed by judicial review. That is an astonishing figure given where we are in the current crisis and what we have to do. That is also about 16.5% of all the development in Dublin, so it is a shocking figure. It does merit being dealt with and a situation where we actually address that problem. However, there are ways we can address it other than trying to put a stricture on judicial review. Judicial review is a constitutional right that is afforded to Irish citizens. It is built into our Constitution and is a really positive thing. It is something that we have beyond most European countries, in fact. We have this right as a citizen to challenge an administrative decision made by a State agency, Minister or whatever it might be, go to an independent High Court judge and say we think this decision has not been made correctly, there is a flaw in the process and we want the judge to examine it. That is a right that we have given the people of this country since the 1930s. I understand that it is frustrating. Sometimes, the exercise of rights is inconvenient. I also understand that the Minister of State has to do something about it because he cannot allow the situation to continue where there is delay in the construction and delivery of housing for the people who need it. I accept all of that. Faster decisions and faster delivery are aims we must all strive for. However, we can look at the way we do it. For starters, one of the reasons judicial review is slow is because of the resources allocated to the courts. We do not have enough judges, courtrooms or staff in the Courts Service to process these decisions. We had this problem many years ago in relation to corporate cases. We stepped in and changed the way they were dealt with. There was a specific, highly managed list created within the High Court for cases involving companies and cases that were worth more that €1 million. One judge was responsible for saying what the timeline was once a case came to court, including the deadlines - side A would present their submissions in two weeks' time and side B would respond in four weeks' time, there be an opportunity in six weeks' time to come back, and there would be a hearing to deal with the case in eight weeks' time. There were severe penalties built in for people who did not comply with that timetable. There was an order of the court to move it along. That could be done with judicial review but there is a resource issue with doing that. Equally, the penalisation of fees is essentially an attack on those bringing judicial reviews. I do not think that is the answer either. I wonder about access to justice and whether this is the right road to go down. There is obviously the locus standi issue as well, which I know is being addressed. The notion that I could live in Letterkenny and object to something in Wexford town is an absolute nonsense. In very few other areas of law is somebody with no standing allowed to make an objection the way they are in planning cases. That is something I favour removing. You should be able to demonstrate some interest in a decision or some reason as to why you are affected by it before you are entitled to start to interfere, delay or review it. That is common sense. It is what normally applies in all other areas of law. In terms of what this Bill is actually trying to achieve, if we could come at it in a slightly different way, it would be better, fairer and more transparent. We should not be afraid of judicial reviews or of the High Court stepping in to look at a decision openly and transparently. In a court, everything is done in public and a decision is usually written and delivered afterwards where it is set out in clear terms why the decision has been made one way or the other. We should not be afraid of that. We should be resourcing reviews so that decisions can be rendered quickly rather than delayed, as is currently the case. While I appreciate the end point we are trying to get to and the fact that nearly 10,000 houses in Dublin cannot continue to be delayed where a judicial review is partly responsible, let us look at this in the round and see if there is a better way. I give a cautious welcome to the Bill. I hope I am wrong about this and that it is going to deliver things and there will not be any ancillary problems. I look forward to its passage.

Sentiment score: 0.06