Cathal Crowe
Clare · Fianna Fáil · Ireland
“The Oireachtas education and youth committee, which I chair, recently compiled a report on school meals. It is a fantastic scheme led out by our colleague, the Minister, Deputy Calleary, and was hugely supported by the Minister, Deputy Foley, when she was at the Department of education.”
“If I can illustrate what imbalanced regional development looks like in the aviation realm, tomorrow, starting early in the morning and right up to about 9.30 p.m., 13 direct flights will depart from Dublin Airport heading to Amsterdam Schiphol, which is recognised as one of the principal and most important European airport hubs.”
“Although it is not in the spine of this legislation, I think there need to be addendums and a new national aviation strategy brought in in the autumn, because the current one is outdated and deals with a time, pre-pandemic, when aviation was going well. It has floundered since and recovered since.”
“There have been some major events in Irish aviation over the past four or five months while this legislation was evolving. I believe there was scope for those to be added in by way of miscellaneous provisions. Perhaps the Minister might bright other legislation before the House in due course.”
“We now need to get to a point where Shannon Airport's and other airports' primary radar and secondary radar are protected by insisting that all wind energy zonings within a five- to eight-kilometre radius must be removed. It is not safe. It has been deemed that by the aviation regulator and by AirNav Ireland.”
“In nearly every Government decision, whether it is on the provision of healthcare, housing, water or sanitary services, there is usually a reference to balanced regional development and other hubs outside of the capital. There is not in this legislation.”
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“Schools. Okay, fair point. The Deputies might speak through the Chair next time. The point I am making on living arrangements is that there is no one living in gendered segregation. It is not right for the men living there and it is not right for their spouses, girlfriends or family members. It is not right at all and it needs to be part of policy going forward that we integrate. I spoke in a debate earlier relating to the Minister's Department and the suspension of those gardaí in Limerick. That is concluded. Going forward, will the Minister please appoint the most senior leadership roles in An Garda Síochána from within the organisation of An Garda Síochána? We do not need to be looking north of the Border to find the next leader and the next Commissioner.”
“It had to because there was a very far-right rhetoric just grasping the nettles here and misrepresenting what Ireland was all about. There is one key point regarding this idea of male-only accommodation. From a policy point of view, we should just get rid of it. I have never seen any group in society segregated according to gender. There are no male-only housing estates. I have yet to see one. There is no female-only housing estate. There is?”
“I have encountered threats to people of being killed, honour killings for being gay, homophobic attacks or honour killings if there have been acts of adultery. All of these are really hard to measure. They are really hard for the individual to convey when there is a hearing about their application and very often these people are sent home. I cannot be judge or jury. I often meet people at clinics or my constituency office but I fear some of them are going back to the bear pit and to very hazardous situations. The Minister's team has to be robust and fair but there are certain issues in some countries that are very hard to measure and to verify. There needs to be a consideration of that as well. During the heat of all of this, people were out banging drums, there were protests and fires were being lit. Thankfully, that has all cooled.”
“This is a liberal democracy but every country has a policy that needs to be robust and fair so that people here in Ireland or people who might be considering coming to Ireland know the rule book of this country and know it is implemented fairly. I will speak about some of the reasons leave to remain applications are refused. It is very easy to say, "I am from Gaza. There is a war. My country has been bombed to pieces." That is very measurable because the whole world knows what is going on there. However, in my constituency, bearing in mind we have a major refugee centre in my community, I have encountered threats from the home country. Very often, it is sub-Saharan countries in which, if people return home, their daughters will have their genitalia mutilated.”
“This Department needs to be led with confidence. Our policies need to be explained with confidence and it explained that they are very fair but are also robust. It needs to be explained that if people are coming to Ireland fleeing war, persecution, famine or turmoil in their home country, this is a very welcoming and inclusive country. Our arms will wrap around them; we will support them. However, if people are coming in under some kind of a charade or false pretences, we have an equally robust system that will examine cases fairly and, if proven to be invalid, people will be deported. That is fair and is a principle we need to defend.”
“The committees that were set up to welcome started lobbying politicians telling them they needed to come back and fix things. They told them the local classes were being taught in the cloakroom of the school and there were no doctors and no services. They told them no bus services were available. The response at the time was to give people hi-vis jackets and let them walk five or six miles over the road to the local school. It was crazy stuff. In time, when this legislation passes, there needs to be some case studies done around the country of where this was not very well handled. The Minister's predecessor did not handle some of the communications of this so well either. I welcome the Minister's forthright approach in the Ministry. I think it has been welcomed by the public and by the media. The commentary is good.”
“We had Ministers and State agency after State agency. There were boots on the ground everywhere. It was covered on the national news every night how incredibly positive this was. Local communities organised collections. One weekend, there was a collection of bicycles for the young children there. Another weekend, it was school uniforms. Every kind of fabulous integration thing happened. Then, suddenly, all of those supports evaporated. The agencies disappeared because the local crisis had become a national crisis. We did not see any of the agencies for ages. Lisdoonvarna went from being the poster child of what international protection should look like in Ireland's best practice model to being an absolute mess that was unsupported and a community struggling.”
“Many people have spent a decade or 12 years there waiting for their application to be cleared. It is what it is and we are proud of that. Yet, when reforms happen, those reforms need to benefit the likes of the Knockalisheen Accommodation Centre. The next place I wish to speak about is the town of Lisdoonvarna. These are local examples that are very relevant in the national context. When the Ukrainian war broke out and when international protection levels hit their peak in terms of inward migration to Ireland, Lisdoonvarna was held up as the poster town in Ireland. The population increased fourfold across a six-month period. The population was around 300 people at the beginning of the war in Ukraine and, between that and inward migration, it increased fourfold. Straight away, we had ambassadors down from different countries.”
“Despite what Deputy Kelly might want to say on TikTok or wherever else tonight, the people who grew up there went to school with me. They were at my wedding. I played with them as a kid. They were friends and they still are. I went into the courtroom for some of them when they were being deported back to their home countries when leave to remain applications had failed. I went into the courtroom with a few people because I believed heart and soul in their story, having intimately known it. When I became a teacher in 2006, my first job when I graduated was teaching children from that refugee centre. Therefore, we are incredibly proud of that centre and our community and what it has done over the years. It is not all perfect. It is not rose-tinted.”
“When he is putting up his social media videos tonight, some of us might correct the record underneath with a comment or two. Anyway, I will get to the point. Seventy years ago, the Hungarian Revolution began. With it, a couple of buses arrived in my home village of Meelick. There was an Army encampment in Knockalisheen right on the border of counties Clare and Limerick. Those old wooden huts that the Army were barracked in during the emergency years of the Second World War became accommodation for people fleeing the Hungarian Revolution. Those little huts, which were only taken down 20 or 30 years ago, became the first refugee centre at that point. It is Ireland's longest continuously used refugee centre and we are so proud of it.”
“I thank the Minister and am glad to have the opportunity to participate in the debate. This is a very serious and emotive issue. It matters to an awful lot of people. Sometimes there are debates when the political charges across the House add value but I was disappointed by Deputy Alan Kelly a short while ago. I was quite surprised by his character. It is not something I would expect from him. As my colleague said, he was conflating. Dropping in buzzwords and zingers looks good on the social media video but misrepresents what many of us here want to see, which is a supportive policy for migration that is there to protect people in international protection but that also has a robust set of rules which ensure the policy has integrity. To misrepresent that is rather shameful.”
“I am glad to say that motorway access is now being fixed, which is part of this. That is largely due to the Minister's intervention that day. He stepped out of the ministerial car and went in her car. We drove through it and he got to see it first hand. That is now happening and it is hugely appreciated.”
“Phase 1 of that is pretty much complete and is going to open in a matter of weeks but phase 2 is just entirely in the doldrums. As I mentioned to him before, the Minister might remember from our childhood that cartoon with Road Runner, where Wile E. Coyote would chase Road Runner out of town. There was always that road at the edge of town where everything just dropped off; there was a cliff edge. That is what the Limerick northern distributor road will look like when its first phase is completed this year. It just ends at a roundabout in my home village of Meelick. It goes no place else, so I would like to see that activated. About three years ago, the Minister sat in a car in Ennis and drove some of the exits from and entrances to the motorway. He met with a woman who lost her husband in a very tragic accident.”
“It looks good but now we have the litmus test of how quickly this can all happen. I note the GPO and the National Concert Hall have been picked as two test projects to see how quickly things can be delivered and that is fine. They are both fabulous projects and both mean a lot as they are symbolic to Ireland but, day to day, I would like to see things like hospitals more fast-tracked. University Hospital Limerick needs to be a test bed. We have a plan and pathway forward to develop that, hopefully having a new accident and emergency department in the mid-west region. That should be a test bed project. The other project I wish to mention is the Limerick northern distributor road. Even though it is a Limerick project, it straddles Clare and Limerick.”
“I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. This time last week, I was in Finland with the Oireachtas education committee. We were there to talk about all things educational but naturally the conversation drifted. We got chatting about their elections and our elections. We finally asked the deputy mayor of Helsinki - we had drifted way off topic - if there were any public projects in his city delayed or overspent on in the past five or six years. He turned to his advisers on the left and right, spoke in a language none of us understood, and he eventually answered us and said "No". There were not. I would love to get to the point in five or six years' time where we are giving similar messages here. Things have become overly convoluted and I commend the Minister because he has started unravelling that knot of red tape.”
“They too have endured reputational damage and seen their careers stagnate and flounder under a veil of unwarranted suspicion. Any remaining trials must be struck out. The apologies need to come from the Commissioner. Additionally, however, the principle of discretion needs to be made very clear to all gardaí. It is a central plank of the syllabus of Templemore training college. Thus, it must be a central plank of day to day policing in Ireland. We either allow it or we do not. Discretion must be central. Can I just say-----”
“I raise the issue of the five gardaí who were acquitted in Limerick Circuit Court this week. They all deserve apologies from the Garda Commissioner, and I sincerely hope this will happen. The Garda division of Limerick encompasses quite a large area of County Clare. I have spoken on this issue many times over the years. In my opinion, this was a witch hunt that was wasteful of the time of our Judiciary and of taxpayer's money. It cost an estimated €3.5 million. It took nine years to happen. You would have been tried for murder in less time than this trial took. The investigation and subsequent trial destroyed the careers and reputation of the five gardaí involved. There is more to it, however, because a much wider net of more junior ranking gardaí had their personal phones and laptops confiscated as part of this investigation.”
“It does not mean going hunting; it means destroying the ground that they need to be in good condition to grow crops or to have hay or silage growing. This is just farcical stuff. The regulations are good solid stuff. The other eye-opener was that if it is as simple as passing some of this with a motion, we must table more motions on various Wednesday nights in the springtime for granny flats and log cabins in back gardens to free up accommodation. We must ensure more of this can happen. I did not realise it is as simple as having a motion. It is very impressive that two major planning issues could be dealt with here so adeptly and swiftly tonight. Hopefully, in the springtime, more motions will be brought forward.”
“There are some really good solid proposals here. I hope they can pass without any kerfuffle tonight. A few things were an eye-opener for me. I listened to the early part of the debate and then returned to my office, but I came back here. Some political parties and politicians are totally divorced from what is involved in farming and rural life. They expressed concern that a farmer should be given an exemption for slurry storage or for building winter housing. In the name of God, where do they hope things will go? Do they want slurry running down fields and into streams? Is that what we want? Do we want cattle to be foddered outside all year round and farmers poaching fields with tractors? I will explain the term "poaching" for some of the urban TDs if they like.”
“I congratulate the Minister on his work to date. He has made a real stamp on the Department. I wish him continued success.”
“Beyond doing day-to-day policing and driving through communities, they are spotting these people living way beyond their means and report it to the Criminal Assets Bureau. The budget for CAB has gone up. The number of gardaí doing this has gone up. We need to move beyond the Kinahan-Hutch level crime we see on the front page of the Sunday World . In every community, there is an absolute scumbag tearing the heart of that community apart. As other Deputies have said, they are driving people to the point that they have to take their lives rather than having their life taken from them by somebody else. We need to add an additional layer of taking down these crime families who are in every single community. I do not know whether it will be accepted tonight, but what we are all speaking about here needs to become embodied in justice policy.”
“There was a term I heard some years ago at a joint policing committee. People were pushing for what is called "mini CAB". In every single village and housing estate, there is some boyo with a fancy car in the driveway. He will have two or three holidays and watches like we have never seen before on his wrists. He is living a life over and beyond what anyone around him could afford. It is two fingers to the law; it is two fingers to his neighbours. People call to his house night after night, and they are not buying popcorn. We all know what is going on. It is happening in every single village. Our gardaí do a fine job, but they are not resourced enough to do all of this. In response, I got an interesting answer. It was a positive one. The Minister told me that there are now 620 gardaí trained up as divisional asset profilers.”
“I was following the debate in my office. I see this as a good amendment. I do not know if it is going to be accepted tonight or whether it can be factored in at a later stage. I join with what other speakers have said. There was a time when we were a more innocent country. People would set off on holidays and put the VCR under the pillowcase, pull the curtains and hope that no one would break into their house. How murky things have become since then, with drug dealing and the crime that goes hand-in-hand with it now having permeated everywhere. I have listened to a lot of the urban Deputies. There are urban parts of my county, but the problem has gone to every rural village as well. I recently asked some parliamentary questions about the Criminal Assets Bureau. It is doing fantastic work.”
“Then we were sold a pup by other European states in terms of fishing quotas. In a matter of days, potentially, if it is not postponed until February, we will have a vote on Mercosur. I asked earlier at Questions on Policy or Legislation what Ireland's position is on Mercosur and, in particular, how these three different negotiated schemes fit together. People will say they are separate, as they undoubtedly are, but that is not how European politics works. Different member states will have their advisers, ministers and negotiating teams horse trading in these negotiations. Given where we had been at with the nitrates directive and where the fisheries deal ended up landing despite everyone's best efforts, I fear we will sign up to Mercosur. I strongly caution against it.”
“That contrasts very sharply with the type of animal being reared in the South American system, where rainforests are being felled en masse , artificially creating pasture where it never existed, and cattle are housed for month upon mouth and fed with grain and concentrate, fattening them artificially to get a higher market price. None of that sits congruently with the Irish system of a grass-fed animal making its way through the local mart as a weanling, then being fattened up and entering the beef chain after two years. It is wrong under any lens, whether the lens of quality of beef or the environmental lens, that Ireland should even consider signing up to the Mercosur deal. Everything is of consequence here. A good deal was struck for Ireland in the past few days on the nitrates directive.”
“There is even some talk that member states could vote on it by the end of the week. To put Mercosur in context, 85% of farming in my county of Clare is based on suckler beef. It is the beef heartland of Ireland. As the Minister of State knows well, most cattle reared in County Clare are on pasture for seven or eight months of the year before being housed and fed silage concentrates or hay, although the latter is less common these days. This produces a superior quality of animal. There are Bord Bia checks, annual tuberculosis tests and genomic testing. A high-quality, healthy, environmentally produced beef animal then enters the food chain after approximately two years.”
“If we are to believe the analysis of the past few days, the fallout of this could see up to one in seven jobs in fishing being lost, with a €94 million loss and a huge shock to the industry overall. Several things are happening in the sphere of agri-fisheries at the moment. The nitrates derogation has been extended for a three-year period. The Mercosur deal will potentially be voted on in the coming days. I am no expert whatsoever on fisheries. We need the context as to where this development fits with all the other issues that are subject to negotiation at this time. There is a real fear among the farming community that in spite of Ireland saying vociferously time and again that it has a whole set of concerns regarding Mercosur, the position still is not clear.”
“I am glad to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. At the outset, I acknowledge the huge efforts the Minister of State made personally, along with his team, in the negotiation field in the past few weeks. Every effort was made by the Minister of State and his team to try to get a good deal for Ireland. What has really happened here is a ganging up of other European countries. We often talk in this political arena about how there can be paralysis of decision-making in the United Nations and in that whole political sphere. When it comes to fishing, there certainly was a ganging-up against Irish fishermen the other night. Neither the State, the Minister of State nor his Department can be faulted for that. What is at stake here is very serious.”
“The Government feels that these disposable vapes - we all know the brand names - are plastic and are usually chucked away after being used. They are very hazardous to the environment as well as being hazardous to your health. I wish the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, all the staff and all Members of the House a very happy Christmas.”
“I hope that, as this Bill and other legislation teed up in the Minister of State's Department progress, some amendment to the 2023 public health Act can be brought forward so that this punitive charge is not imposed on the small retailer and that a greater portion is paid by larger retailers. I welcome to the Public Gallery students from Rice College in Ennis. These are the last few days of their school term before they wrap up for Christmas. They have come up to Leinster House and the Dáil today. They are having a nice day out. I welcome all the boys and girls from third year in Rice College who are here today. They may have come in at the end of the debate. For the next while, we will be debating disposable vapes and how the Government can legislate to ensure fewer young people take up vaping. It is very harmful for your health.”
“However, I have spoken to the Minister of State in the past and she will know I have an issue with the small retailer, a small shop in a village, paying the very same rate as Lidl, Aldi, Dunnes Stores, Tesco and so on. That is fundamentally wrong. There should be a far higher licensing fee for those huge retailers and a more minor charge for others. They are not at fault here. We need to home in on the companies that manufacture these vapes, sell them and market them to young people. I hope that can be looked at. The Minister of State and I have had several chats on the matter.”
“I was on the previous Committee on Health, which looked at this matter, and I believe the increase is down to the way these products are packaged and sold. They are seen as quite trendy. Young people are encouraged to take up these products. I would be very supportive of anything that curtails their use. The public health Act of 2023 brought in licensing fees for the sale of tobacco and nicotine products. Before that legislation was passed, there was a registration fee of €50 per annum per retail premises regardless of how big or small the premises was. Now, there is a charge of €1,000 for the sale of tobacco products and €800 for the sale of nicotine products. The combined cost for a retailer is therefore €1,800 per annum. I have no issue with the cost.”
“I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill this afternoon. It is really important. There is not a shop you can go to in the country where you will not see bins outside the door littered with these awful looking disposable vapes. There is also some kind of trend to stick the stickers peeled off the top of these disposable vapes all over the bin. They just seem to be everywhere. I will get to the health hazards in a moment but, from an environmental point of view, these horrible little glowing neon plastic modules are flung around everywhere. It is worrying that, in recent years, we have seen the rate of vaping among young people increase at the same time that the rate of smoking nicotine products seems to be decreasing.”
“It does not sit well that we should have to meet these increased standards in terms of reducing our greenhouse gases, yet there could be a possibility of felling rainforest and bringing in an inferior animal from Brazil or other parts of South America as part of Mercosur. What will the Government be doing? We would like some reassurances. Finally, I wish the Ceann Comhairle, the staff and Members of the House a very happy Christmas.”
“County Clare is the heartland of suckler beef, with 85% of farming in the county being suckler beef-based. I farm myself. We have Hereford, shorthorn and Dexter cattle. It does not sit well with farmers in Clare and other counties in the west that we could enter a Mercosur deal. The type of cattle we raise in the west are pasture-based for seven months or eight months of the year. Then they are housed indoors and fed silage. It a very environmentally friendly way. It goes from field to fork very quickly. The standards are so high, with genomics, Bord Bia and annual TB testing. The standard of beef from the animal, and the care of animal is so high.”
“For all we know, there could be deleterious material in those blocks that will be activated when they bore through them and start pumping material into them, which causes water and chemical agents to engage with the blocks. What I am getting at is that I have yet to come across a case that did not involve pumped insulation of cavity walls. Cautionary guidance notes need to be issued that pumped insulation is some form of catalyst. I am not saying the pumped beading is wrong but it gives rise to some chemical reaction that starts to break down blocks. Yet, we are in overdrive with SEAI grants. The people I spoke with in Clare on Monday night said that someone has to scream that this has been a catalyst in their homes and there needs to be a re-examination of the scheme.”
“In anything I have seen, the common theme is deterioration of the concrete, crumbling and asymmetrical cracking. When I look at the gable end of these houses, I always ask the person if they got pumped insulation. They will say they did and when I ask when, they will say about three years ago. I will then ask when the cracks began and they will say it was about two years ago. It is a common theme. The builder who emailed said we should have our debate and talk about 100% redress and the legal aspects but someone has to scream about the SEAI grants. While they are essential - I am not saying we should scrap or pause them - someone has to give some advisory note to people who are applying for SEAI grants that the house that is beautifully painted and standing proud may become more susceptible.”
“At the moment, this is on the pages of the Government. It is taxpayer's money funding remediation for taxpayers but someone has to pay for this. The levy in itself is not sufficient. That landmark case must be taken. It would be a bit of retribution, which this country needs. As we were preparing for this Dáil week and printing off our briefing notes, I got an interesting email from someone at home in Clare. There is a recurring theme and I am guessing it is similar in Donegal, Mayo and other places. It was from a builder who stated there is probably a little bit of pyrite or mica in every single block. It is a chemical constituent that is in the ground. It is mined and gets mixed in a batching plant. If there is sufficient cement in the concrete block and it has a decent constitution, it will probably withstand that.”
“In an appeasement that evening, which gave great hope to many of us, we heard there was going to be a landmark legal case taken by the State and the Attorney General was preparing a huge case against the quarries and the concrete block manufacturers, one of which is one of the biggest companies in Europe, Roadstone, which is part of CRH. Let us name that company and put a face to this. There was to be a landmark legal case taken so the companies would pay and rather than the taxpayers paying, it would actually be the companies that were culpable that would pay for all of this. I ask the Minister to give the House an update on that. I understand it is a colossal case and it will be challenged. The Minister is a good person but we need to hear there is some movement on that case because someone should pay for this.”
“It is becoming a churn, whereby remediation options are given and then rejected because no one will stand over them and then they go back in again. That is not working. I remember when we had the large Bill. It was a big evening of vote after vote on Committee Stage, as other speakers said. That evening, the former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, rather clumsily said, in a retort across the Chamber, that it was taxpayer's money that would pay for the scheme. Many Deputies in the Opposition and on the Government backbenches, as well as member of the media, noted that the people who are affected are the taxpayers of Ireland. It is their homes that are falling in.”
“There are a few points I wish to make on these amendments. First, option B is what a lot of people in County Clare are getting. It means that outer and inner leaf will have to eventually be demolished, but the roof has to be kept. That is what they are being told. They are all telling me it is impossible to get a contractor. When contractors come out and look at the property, they wonder whether they are going to put stilts under the roof or prop up the roof and ask where they will start the demolition and where they will start the rebuild. The remediation options are not working. As Deputy O'Donoghue said, all building works, small and large, have to be certified and that is proving to be nigh on impossible.”
“So far, those efforts have failed. I ask that the Government and HSE redouble its efforts. It is imperative that Newmarket on Fergus has a GP practice on the main street and people are not shipped up the road to Clarecastle. I ask for Government and HSE intervention on this.”
“Yesterday, a large number of people in the village of Newmarket on Fergus, County Clare, received a letter advising them that their local GP surgery would close and all operations and appointments would be moved centrally to the Saffron and Blue clinic in Clarecastle. One might say what about it, is a doctor not allowed to make those decisions? I would say that the answer is fundamentally "No". It is a failure if this is allowed to happen. There are 927 people on the patient list who are medical card holders. Therefore, the State is a major stakeholder here. That is a State contract. Owing to age and, indeed, the lack of public transport in many situations, there is a need for the surgery to be at the heart of Newmarket on Fergus. The HSE has advised me that it tried to seek a premises on the main street to house a surgery.”
“During that debate, we were goaded by Deputy Ruth Coppinger. What she did not tell anyone was that during the time she was not in the Dáil, she opposed and objected, with a €20 note, to 211 apartments in Clonsilla. She was slagging off different politicians here earlier. It is wrong to deny 211 people a home for a €20 objection fee. It is fundamentally wrong.”
“The accuracy of that positioning on screen cannot be guaranteed if there is a 180 m turbine blade spinning in close proximity. It is all very technical, but the IAA has raised a big red flag. It is the supreme authority on air safety. It says that it is not safe. What does An Coimisiún Pleanála do? It overrode this and granted planning permission for one wind farm in east Clare. It has now brought in a consultant from Britain. Something is radically wrong here. During an earlier debate on housing, I mentioned the damage a €20 objection fee can do. It is like throwing a grenade at a planning application. The application could be for a multimillion euro bridge, bypass, hospital wing or whatever. It could be a major housing scheme that would cost millions of euro to develop, but the damage that a €20 objection can do is immense.”
“It is fundamentally wrong to override the State body that is the supreme power when it comes to air safety. The reason I bring this up is because of the debate that has been going on here all day and all last week about wind energy. That is a debate in its own right. There is a spectrum of views on that issue in this House. The one thing I can tell Members, and I can share those documents with the Minister, is that the Irish Aviation Authority has said that in general it has no problem with wind energy, but it has a major health and air safety concern when planning permission for wind turbines is applied for in close proximity to primary or secondary radar. The pinging signal from the magnetron goes up, pings off an aircraft and positions it on the screen of air traffic controller.”
“Is a company that boasts about this independent enough to be able to advise our State planning authority on matters relating to air safety and wind turbines next door to radars? Is the company qualified to do that? What due diligence did An Coimisiún Pleanála undertake to hire the company? What has it cost the taxpayer? It is a crying sin when we have a whole five-storey building on D'Olier Street with all of the air safety experts. They have been overlooked to hire a consultancy company in Britain. It is not the Minister's fault but someone from An Coimisiún Pleanála has to answer these questions. I have asked this question in the Dáil and I asked it again in the past week with a letter to An Coimisiún Pleanála, written in anger last Saturday night, and I am still awaiting an answer.”
“That is where the buck stops. It is the regulator that sets the safety standards for Ireland. It is not just the planes that take off from Dublin, Shannon, Cork and Knock. Some 90% of flights between America and Europe pass over Irish airspace each day. They pay money to the State, so there is a dividend for the Government, but overall this is about air safety. The IAA is the only authority. However, An Coimisiún Pleanála flatly ignored the Irish Aviation Authority and hired a consultancy company from Britain named Sagentia Aviation. I am sure Sagentia Aviation has much expertise and is a fine company. However, one can easily find a page on the company's website on which it boasts about having helped over 300 wind farm companies get their planning across the line. I do not know, so I am posing the question rather than accusing.”
“However, I made the point that it had no in-house expertise whatsoever in the realms of air safety, avionics, radar and all of those things. These are not run-of-the-mill planning matters. Rather, they are really specialised fields. I raised the lack of in-house expertise at An Coimisiún Pleanála with the Minister and the Taoiseach. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, took it another day during questions on promised legislation. The upshot of all of that was around a week and a half after one of my debates here in the Dail, I got a letter from An Coimisiún Pleanála stating that it had hired as an adviser an independent expert on air safety. I am my party's spokesperson on aviation. To my mind, there is only one independent expert on air safety in this country, that is, the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, on D'Olier Street.”
“They had what we as local councillors called package treatment plants. The sewage was pumped to a facility in a corner of the site where it was treated. It became a dirty term afterwards. When Irish Water and, indeed, local authorities came into play, they did not want to know about package treatment plants because they were seen as being troublesome. We are nearly 20 years on from that. Infrastructure has moved on light years and I am glad that the Minister made a policy change in that regard in recent weeks. I have a major concern at the moment. I stood up here in the past month in three different Dáil debates and I flagged that An Coimisiún Pleanála had a huge amount of in-house expertise in planning. Sure, why would it not? It is the supreme authority when it comes to all matters of planning.”