I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. As Chairman of the Joint Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery, I welcome this particular discussion and look forward to this legislation going to the committee. As Chairman, I will ensure we have a thorough, effective and detailed discussion on Committee Stage. We will have ample time for any issues that need to be raised, discussed or teased out at the committee where we can get into the specifics of the legislation. I welcome and support this important Bill that creates a new fast track approval process for critical infrastructure. Under this new legislation, every public body will be required to do everything within its power to accelerate approval of any designated project to the maximum extent possible. Public bodies will also be required to co-operate with each other. That is going to be a new process for many organisations but that is essentially how the Bill will operate. They will be able to co-ordinate, prioritise and sequence their duties with other public bodies and allocate any administrative, technical or decision-making resources necessary for a rapid approval of a project or programme. The Bill specifically identifies critical infrastructure in the energy, transport and water sectors as a priority. This infrastructure is necessary to underpin all other development in the State from housing, which is the most important infrastructure we need, to other economic and social investments. A recent Government circular established a mandatory cross-government process for the rapid reporting of court decisions that may affect the delivery of critical national infrastructure. This ensures early identification of judicial decisions that could influence how future infrastructure projects are planned or assessed and delivered. That is important because not every Government agency watches what every other agency is doing and there could be a court decision that could be relevant across the board and it is important we have a centralised area to keep a close eye on and have the information on these matters. The Government will designate individual projects or programmes as critical infrastructure by order to be laid before Dáil Éireann, meaning every specific project will have to be laid before this House and if a resolution annulling the order is passed within the next 21 sitting days, the order shall be annulled. There will, therefore, be an opportunity for these to be debated in the House. I stress this is about national infrastructure to help in the three areas I have mentioned. We cannot get into fixing every pothole using this legislation. That is not the intention. Everybody in the House, including me, could draw up a list of two dozen critical pieces of infrastructure that are required in our counties but if this legislation is to be effective, we cannot swamp these public bodies with 50, 60, 70, 80 or 100 critical projects because which of them would the public bodies prioritise? The essence of successfully implementing legislation will be to strategically concentrate on key projects that will help delivery of housing and other infrastructure such as water services that have been mentioned. If we are focused on what we do, we can get a lot done but it is important we do not overstretch all the public bodies beyond their ability to deliver these projects. It is also important that we simplify and streamline the regulatory and consenting process. Many Deputies have mentioned this and they must work together collectively. For example, in a recent report I read, there was reference to several consenting bodies and regulatory bodies, and they have to work together in co-operation rather than in individual silos. The ones in that report were the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Environmental Protection Agency, Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, An Coimisiún Pleanála and National Parks and Wildlife Service. Every one of those has a specific role to fulfil backed up by legislation, but part of what is behind this is to make them sit down together on projects that can affect those various agencies, not for each one of them to do it in sequence so that in five years we have reached the end of an approval or consenting basis. That is important. Through our engagement with the business community, I understand many people are furious at the delays and the time major capital projects take. Many people cannot build a home because of the lack of infrastructure. Motorists are stuck in traffic jams for hours when they need to get to work on time or get children to school and we need the infrastructure for all these areas that are very important for the delivery of these services. The accelerating infrastructure task force report found successive reforms over many years have significantly increased the complexity of modern infrastructure delivery. Every time we set up a new agency, it is an independent body that is only responsible to itself and its board or its line Department. It is important we have co-ordination between these bodies on an ongoing basis. In the coming months and years, Ministers will be watching all these and it is important that there will be ongoing reporting by the Minister for public expenditure to ensure they are all delivering as they are required to by the Government. That will be as a result of matters laid before this Dáil. The Government is not going to do this behind the public’s back. We have various frameworks in place for consenting agencies, all of which have a value. They would not be there otherwise but we need to ensure complex and overlapping consents do not prohibit essential works being undertaken. The recent infrastructure action plan covers a lot of legal reform and regulatory simplification and I acknowledge the Minister’s work in bringing that in. The House and its Members love to complicate things when they get into detail but sometimes there can be a simple approach. We have over-complicated our lives. Every one of us knows that at local level, not to mind here at national level. We want to have co-ordination between all of these bodies. This action plan will lead to regulatory simplification, acknowledging the laws and the environmental laws that are there. Every time we delay a project, time is money. A delayed project costs more money. Whose money is it? It is the taxpayers' money. It is not in the interests of this House or the people who elected us to this House to delay things unnecessarily. It is important we look after the taxpayers' money wisely in all of these areas. This issue of judicial reviews has been mentioned. The number of such reviews has increased substantially in recent years. We are all familiar with that. Wind farms and renewable energy have been mentioned. We have been all been at meetings where objectors, who have the right to object, say that their approach will be to object at local authority level and to An Bord Pleanála, and then, regardless of what happens there, to go for a judicial review and go to the High Court. They hope that this will take seven or eight years and the developers will have gone away by then. Most of us, if we are honest, will say that we have attended meetings where people have said openly and publicly, before a single plan has been put on the table, that they will delay it for seven or eight years and then they will go away. That is no way to run the country. What has been proposed here is proportionate and reasonable in the circumstances. I am very pleased that the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, will have a key role in providing advice to various Government bodies, rather than each Government body when it has a project having to go away and get its own consultants to do it. There will be a repository of information available to the NDFA, which is appearing before the committee I will chair tomorrow as part of this ongoing work. We have a specific Oireachtas committee dealing with infrastructure, which we have never had before, so there is an opportunity there. Any Member of this House or the Seanad is welcome to attend any of our meetings, which happen every week. We have had a series of meetings with agencies such as Uisce Éireann and Bord Gáis. All of the organisations mentioned today have appeared and given their views to our committee over the past several months. That will continue so there is an ample forum in this House to grill any one of those organisations. I encourage people who are of a mind to do so, and have the time to do so, to come to tomorrow's meeting with the NDFA, which will have a key input to make to this entire process. It will be more efficient to have a centralised repository of skills in an area rather than every Department having to go it alone. I expect that the Committee Stage debate next week will be thorough, detailed and very effective. I look forward to it. There have been legitimate comments that we did not have pre-legislative scrutiny on this Bill. It has already been said by people in this House that it is a very short, simple Bill. That has already been said by Members of the Opposition during the past hour, and I agree with it. As Chairman of the committee, it is my honest belief that if we had done pre-legislative scrutiny, we would be inviting people in to listen to them from now until the recess in June or July; we would come back next September or October for a draft report; we might have a final report by next October; and all of this could delay the critical infrastructure legislation by six months. I believe this legislation is important. We need to get on with it, with proper Oireachtas scrutiny, but we do not need to delay it unnecessarily. As has been said here, we can quote all the delays we like all over the country and we can refer to everybody who causes those delays. If the Oireachtas started its work on this legislation by delaying its implementation by six months, it would not send a good signal. We are better to do our detailed work as we would normally do on Committee Stage. Every organisation that could have been expected to come in as part of pre-legislative scrutiny has already appeared, or will be appearing, before our committee in the normal course of events in the weeks and months ahead. I am satisfied that the legislation, when it is passed, will be effective. All I will say to the Government is that when the legislation is completed I ask the Minister, Deputy Chambers, to monitor progress on a monthly basis to make sure he is satisfied all the targets are being delivered on.

Sentiment score: 0.19