Mattie McGrath warns on rushed planning bills, de-zoning and secrecy

Thanks for allowing us to switch you around as well. We thought there was a second round, but there's not. These bills are being rushed, Minister. It's always near the end of term that they're coming in, and the Wednesday night guillotine, you know, all stage is taken. It's not good enough. This has serious implications on everybody. Every man, woman and child in the city who are in the country who wants a house, and there are many people, noble people, that need a house for local authority, and they're entitled to get that as well, but they're not being built either. Minister, I want to say to you that these areas here, Rural Planning Commissions, you know, they're very, very important. The role of a board panel is hugely important. The role of Antashka, as a prescribed body, under the Planning Act, should be removed as such a body. And concerns around the planning regulator. We never had a planning regulator at home quite recently. He's writing to me, he must be very fond of me, he's writing to me six times to meet us. I know Deputy Verona Murphy and the whole group met him and had many issues with him. We didn't need an office of a planning regulator. It's another quango with a brass plate on his front door or the side of it. And a nice set-up staff. He's diminishing the role of the county councillors. And I want to say now, I'm shocked and I guess my daughter Maureen's on the council. Week in, week out now, the plan has been reviewed. Workshop after workshop after workshop after workshop. You'd think there were building houses inside the workshops. Nothing held out in the open. When I was in the county council, thankfully, all our meetings, except one annual meeting for a financial workshop, were held in public. And the press, why the secrecy? Why the cloak and dagger? Minister, the Clare Town plan was done recently, just finished a couple of months ago. And a lot of residents in the Mountain View driving, Mountain Road area, made submissions that plan. You decided to de-zone 50 hectares out of 60 hectares and leave it to 10. And here, presto, I was involved with many landowners there who wanted to develop some community-type voluntary housing and everything else for the last 15 years. Couldn't because of the poor standard of the Mountain Road, too narrow, and no access road. And there's still no access road. And it was in a previous plan, and it's taken out of the care plan now. Here, presto, the council come along last week, four weeks ago, and announced, and there's a public meeting down towards the evening, can't call a hint, I won't be here, in the town, to say they want to build 43 houses in the green area in Mountain View Drive, and the green playing fields that they have for playing. This is madness, de-zoning that. And they're flying in the face of all the refusals that they gave, and the just rebuttals they gave, the people who want to build private houses, and any development at all couldn't come down the Mountain Road, and still can't. And ambulance got stuck the last week. So I salute Neil, Killeen, and others who are organizing this meeting. They all made submissions to the county, the town plan, but they were all ignored. So there, what's happening then? Where's the democracy there? And it's not fit. Cormac Drive and Nina, again, a Part 5. It was done some years ago, which was never properly finalized. Part 8 or Part 5, just mixed up in which one it was, Part 8, I think. And they never concluded. So the residents were forced to take a court case in this past year. And now, silency has arrived, because the court case has ended. There was a real secrecy on the members who took it. Again, the council messed around, didn't complete the Part 8 process properly, and now, without admitting liability, said, come on, lads, we'll pay the expenses if you go away. This is no way to treat people and communities. The people and communities are good people living in those housing states, want to have these states kept, not build every green bit of land that we wanted. Especially at this time, when now we're building, when we're de-zoning so much land. I don't know what's going on. I know that the Greens and others had a big issue about re-zoning, but, I mean, like Deputy Healy Way said, leave some land for his own. Don't push them all into ghettos. The density, the Parliament Regulator is insisting on massive densities, high densities, which have proved disastrous in the past. And I'm aghast to hear Deputy Murphy saying that the county manager in Wexford told her that she had no authority to make any submission or any impact in the county development plan. We, as ROCIS members, under the abolition of the dual mandate, are allowed to have full access. We can't go to meetings, but we can attend and we can't speak. But the county managers don't want this because we might bring too much information back to the councillors. Thank you.