Mattie McGrath warns against land agency, defends county councils

I too am glad to be able to speak on this here today, and while I thought about this for a while, when it was promoted first, I thought it might be a good idea, but then, when I looked and saw, and I see the proposals in it, I think this would be a disaster, because it is, as the previous speaker said, it's going to suit the developers, and there's a huge hoarding of land that has gone on since the last housing, the bust, and it's there, and if I can speak about Tipperary, we have lost everything in Tipperary, we've lost all our town councils, members that serve there, some of them on a voluntary basis, and for all they got, for the costs, but they were a huge asset to all the towns that had them, we were amalgamated in with North Tipperary, a takeover, as I called it, it wasn't an amalgamation, and you know, South Tipperary was literally devastated, plundered, as I said, we kept Cromwell out of Cromwell, and we couldn't keep the people from North Tipper coming down, taking away our road services, our planning, everything else, took the whole lot to Nina, nothing against people at Nina at all, but it was so unfair, what happened, and we were left with, we had a budget of £15.1 million for the town of Clonmel, the Borough Council, one of the finest boroughs in the country, now we have pittance, maybe a couple of hundred thousand, if we're looking to fight for the crumbs, for to maintain the town infrastructure, it's nothing, getting back to land, the Tipperary County Council have land in every town and village, that's literally abandoned, people were prosecuted in the past for having land with boucalons on them, and having land with thistles on them, and they should, and so, and even the motorways now, are destroyed, we don't maintain some of them, the adjacent land to them, or the slopes, and they're quite wild, but they have land everywhere, in Tipperary, in every town, Carrigan Shure, Kilchiland, Clonmel, all along with that, you know, every area, Tipperary town have nearly a farm, they're a good sized farm, the land that they have, so, this land could be built by local authorities, we don't want another agency, because agencies to me, become quangos, and of course, we have different people, and we know some of the famous names, they don't know where they want to go for the Mayor of Limerick, or they want to be the head of the land agency, or whatever they want, and what, we don't need another agency, to take away more powers, from the elected councillors, we also have the 2040 plan, which is devastating rural land, and we have many other new agencies put in there, to deal with people who are trying to develop their county development plan, so, we have agency after agency, after agency, after agency, and they're useless, most of them, because they don't do what they're set up to do, they become self-serving, so, let the county council build the houses, they built them in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and when they had no equipment, and no big machinery, and what's wrong now, we have so many reports now, up to the department, six months, back down to the county council, up to the department, and there's many going around pushing paper, and nothing being built, with a steep housing crisis that we have, so, we don't need an ad agency, and I won't be supporting it, the dependents that we're doing, but I certainly won't be supporting it, because, it's another quango, as I said, CPO has been mentioned, CPO is necessary, certainly, and so for road projects, and for some, you know, very necessary projects, but certainly used for those things, but we don't want to give too much power to this quango, and take away more power, as I said, from the county council, the elected members, who are there, and their advice, and eyes and ears, of the public, so, as I said, we have, and I wish to be a new minister as well, but I'm not supporting this, as I said, as the developer of this agency, we need to empower the councils again, give them the funding, and give more funding to the better ones, that spend the money, and because, it's, some of them are very nostalgic and spending it, so, I want to say that we need to build, as I said, council houses, we have listed over here, I, I, the only, I issued in, the Part 5 project can be abused, and it was abused in Nina, where they have 80, 60, 70, 80 acres, out, out, out, out, in a stream, and they build houses now, a number of houses inside the middle of a housing estate in the one little bit green area they had and it's now in the courts but it shouldn't be happening. Those people in those estates built those that maintain their estates and they want to keep their green area. You would mind if they hadn't another master of land but to have as I said 70 acres not so far out in the outskirts of the town and service by roads and everything else. So what we need is some kind of empowerment for local authorities to get their infrastructure to get service capacities in all the villages and towns because you can talk about land and zone land and everything else if you happen to the sewer system you can't build a talk of one you can't build any house so every village in my area most of them 80% of them are in my county are without proper infrastructure in road for that sewage and indeed of stormwater so they must be there. Some of them are developer led schemes they worked out fine some of them wouldn't because the planners didn't enforce the planning conditions so there's a lot of blame can be touched a lot of people but I don't think the panacea here is and the cure here is the land development agency with a CEO and a whole plethora of the first thing they have is a big office and plaque up in the wall and they have their furniture quite expensive so stick and support the people who want to build the houses and let their own the people who want to build the house themselves in the country. Build them for more goes.