Michael McDowell
National University of Ireland · Independent · Ireland
“Then I think of this particular Chamber where people are polite and kind to each other and listen to each other respectfully. There is no baying or shouting down or whatever. It is a great tribute to the Seanad staff that that spirit continues to exist in this House.”
“I note that the whole scheme of the planning Act is that exempt development proposals are considered by the Houses. It is questionable whether this House has really considered the exempt development regulations. Without debate, we sent them off to a committee.”
“I am one of the people who disagrees with the substance of that report. We have to have a real solid debate on it here in this House, not merely a cursory one. It is an issue of fundamental importance. It cannot be avoided, one way or the other. Whatever your views are on it, it needs to be thrashed out.”
“Although coming up to the end of this term we are rushing things through, and the guillotine is well-oiled and slicing this way and that, we have a lot of work to do in the autumn.”
“The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretar…”
“If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombar…”
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“It is not "right-thinking members of society" nor "left-thinking members of society", but "reasonable members of society" and a jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person might make of something. Twelve jurors who sit down in a room after they have heard all the evidence are capable of arriving at, I suggest, a reliable, typical and representative determination as to what a reasonable person would regard as a defamatory statement. Let us consider assault as an example. An assault is not what a "reasonable" person would regard as an assault. When you come to something like a breach of contract, it is not what a "reasonable" person would regard as a breach of contract. It is either "Yea" or "Nay", legally; in other words, that was an assault or it was not, or that was professional negligence or that was not.”
“Their approach to the credibility of witnesses is, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, probably very different from the approach of the woman and man on the street called to jury service on a random basis. If the test of what is defamatory is considered to be one which takes into account what the ordinary person would make of the alleged defamatory statement, we have a problem. To underline this point, the meaning of the "defamatory statement" which must occur and be made public before an action can be brought is, under the 2009 Act, "a statement that tends to injure a person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society, and 'defamatory' shall be construed accordingly". It is this test. Who are "reasonable members" and are judges typical of the attitude of people in society?”
“1, I feel strongly that if we take the jury out of defamation we are asking the judge to look at a test that is a test of what ordinary right-thinking people would consider as to whether something was defamatory or not or was true or not, having heard the evidence. It is a test quintessentially designed for a jury, not for a judge. Judges are not ordinary people. They simply are not. No matter who chooses them or how they are appointed, they are not ordinary people. They are people who are learned in the law, we hope. They are people who have practised as lawyers in the courts, we hope. They are people whom I do not doubt have many virtues, but are they representative of society as a whole? I say they are not individually representative of it. Their attitudes are probably different from the attitudes of society as a whole.”
“Consider an issue that involves the fundamental trustworthiness of a political figure or a public figure such as a bishop, president of a university, TD, Senator, a person with strong and known political opinions especially somebody who is known to have unpopular political opinions or even ones which would be rejected by the great majority of voters or jury people just looking at it that way. I do not believe those trials should be conducted by judges sitting alone for the very reason the importance of the outcome dictates a simple verdict be written on the issue paper by a jury that is impermeable, meaning you cannot go into the jury room and ask them why they did what they did and nobody attempts to do that. Nobody says they got it wrong. They say that was the jury’s decision and that is what we will have to live with. On amendment No.”
“We have examples in the United Kingdom of politicians being disbelieved by judges. I think a Conservative chief whip got a roasting from a judge, which could have been career-ending, because of an altercation at the gates of Downing Street where he claimed he was required to dismount his bicycle by an over-officious policeman. He was disbelieved on his oath by a judge sitting alone. The result was his career being very seriously tainted by that decision. I hope we do not have as trivial a case as that, like an argument between a TD or Senator and a member of An Garda Síochána. I do not suggest that should end up in the courts at all, and it would not in Ireland given the way we see things.”
“There were times where insurers, rightly or wrongly, believed that some judges merged their judicial role with that of Santa Claus and gave huge damages for things that otherwise would not be recoverable. On the other hand, many judges were regraded as mean. The offer to be made by an insurance company was and still is largely determined by the claims manager’s view as to who will hear the case and who will not. The notion, therefore, that members of the Judiciary are going to be absolutely predictable arbiters in these matters is delusional. My fundamental objection to the abolition of juries is that there are matters where it is wiser to leave the decision in defamation cases to a jury who simply come in with an issue paper answered "Yea" or "Nay" or deal with the issues that come before them. I believe in that.”
“We have a Report Stage coming in this legislation and those matters could be tweaked out without rejecting this amendment. The fundamental point is this. The newspapers and the broadcast media have convinced themselves that juries are a problem for them and that things would be very different if judges decided these matters by themselves. I do not follow that logic. I recall, although I am not trying to suggest it should be reversed, that where juries dealt with personal injuries cases, the insurance companies got a rude shock when they discovered what the average judge was capable of doing to them. We have spent 30 years trying to put down damages guidelines.”
“That deals with the point I raised earlier, that the judge would deal with the amount of damages in such cases, but the facts would be determined by a jury. I would not go that far myself for this simple reason. If a judge totally disagrees with the verdict of the jury and the judge thinks that witness A, who the jury accepted the evidence of, was lying and exaggerating, the damages, including exemplary damages and the like, are likely to be coloured by the judge’s view of the matter rather than the jury’s view of the matter. For instance, for the quantum of any damages, with this amendment, you have to decide whether punitive damages or exemplary damages fall within the judicial remit or the jury’s remit on the particular wording.”
“Is the Lucy Letby case one which, if it was in a civil trial, too complex for a jury to decide and one that only a judge, looking at all the medical records, would be suitable to try? The reason I mention that is amendment No. 1 effectively puts into the law a presumption of trial by jury, on which subject I am relaxed. I think it should be discretionary. The grounds for discretion should perhaps be wider than are set out in her amendment. In the amendment, subsection (2) states: The court may, on the application of any party to a defamation action in the High Court, order that in matters which may involve substantial damages- (a) issues of fact shall be tried with a jury, and (b) the quantum of any damages which may arise be adjudicated by the presiding judge.”
“That is in criminal law, but the same applies in defamation and other areas such as malicious falsehood and assault, the other things for which jury trial will survive if this legislation is enacted. The third thing I wish to say is this. Senator Ryan’s amendment goes further than later amendments to which we will come in due time in that it effectively reverses the onus in favour of jury trial. In other words, the circumstances in which a person can be tried without a jury are those set out in paragraphs (a) and (b). In particular, it requires the notion that protracted examination of documents, accounts or technical, scientific or local investigation, which cannot be conveniently be made with a jury. What are those?”
“All of those consequences flow from a reasoned determination as to the credibility of witnesses. They all flow from that. That is why the Judiciary tends to be polite to gardaí they are slightly dubious about, to use a euphemism. They tend to say they are left in a reasonable doubt and, therefore, are acquitting. They do not say, “That Garda witness was telling me a series of lies and it was written all over his or her face”. They do not say things like that. That is why a jury trial is beneficial. Nobody says at the end of the case that they disbelieved that garda or they accepted the evidence of that person. They hand down a “guilty” or “not guilty” verdict, and the verdict stands.”
“They would never, or very rarely, say, for example, "I reject the testimony of Detective Garda McDowell and I accept that the man accused of being a member of the IRA - or whatever - is telling me the truth about what happened in that prison cell". I have never seen that happen. The most one could expect from the Judiciary was – there are exceptions to this – an emollient remark saying, “I still have doubts about the testimony I have heard”. That is because if one says, “I reject witness A’s testimony” and that person happens to be a public official, such as a member of An Garda Síochána, that is hung around that Garda witness’s neck for the rest of his life. You were disbelieved. What is more, the Court of Appeal said it was right to disbelieve you. Will you continue to testify in criminal cases? Will you ever be called again?”
“You have conflicting evidence - two parties - and one said this happened and another said that happened. If a jury takes a look at the both of them and says they do not like the look of witness A and thinks witness A is unconvincing, it does not say so in its verdict. It just simply hands down the verdict – case dismissed or whatever. The person is not defamed. It does not go into the detail. I have noted that, for instance, in the Special Criminal Court, for many years the most that the members of the Judiciary there would do was to say that they were left in a doubt in a swearing match between the accused and Garda witnesses. The most they would ever say is that they were left in a doubt.”
“Has this judge ever dealt with a defamation case previously? Is he or she always for the plaintiff or is he or she always for the defendant? The acceptability of jury verdicts is something which we are being asked to throw away in the case of defamation. Let us be clear about what we are asked to do today. We are being asked that a judge in future will set out in writing precisely who he believed and who he did not believe and give the reasons for disbelieving witness A and witness B. One of the most inhibiting duties that judges have cast upon them is giving the reasons why they disbelieved one person’s evidence rather than another’s when it based fundamentally on their demeanour in the witness box, and it is based on something like that.”
“That proposition disregards the merits of jury trials in their entirety. I have rarely if ever heard anybody criticise a jury, civil or criminal, for its verdict. People may criticise the amount of damages, but that could easily be dealt with in various other ways. I have never ever heard anybody stand up in public and say the jury should have believed A but they believed B. The media have never said that a jury in a civil case got it radically wrong, that they disbelieved the gardaí and believed the man who said he was assaulted by the gardaí or vice versa . People accept jury verdicts. The Judiciary should be very careful. Their verdicts will not be accepted when it comes down to the evidence of witness A or B on a matter of major controversy. They will immediately ask who is this judge. Has this judge dealt with other cases before?”
“On one occasion the late Chief Justice Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh stated that the reason we had criminal trials by jury was not that we could not safely give the present Judiciary the right to determine criminal guilt by themselves but because some future malign Judiciary might be appointed and this was the purpose of the right to trial by jury. It was put there against the possibility that unfair judges might in the future be appointed. I had and still have the height of respect for former Chief Justice Ó Dálaigh, but that was a very naive statement. It is in the Irish Reports if anybody wants to go and look for it. The second point relates to the requirement that some things in society should not be determined by professional judges but by empanelled jurors who are, broadly speaking, representative of society.”
“That was the judicial mentality, that this simply could not be and that it was unthinkable to his judicial mind to even contemplate it as a possibility. He was by no means a reactionary judge. He was regarded by his fellow judges as a bit of a maverick on occasion. That shows the mentality that is there. We only have to look at judges determining significant evidence, like Lord Chief Justice Widgery in the Bloody Sunday inquiry, to see that there are problems with judicial adjudications. By themselves, the Judiciary are not infallible.”
“If we do not believe in that proposition, then we should look at what juries in Britain did to suspected IRA bombers who were entirely innocent. We must remember the evidence tendered by the West Midlands Constabulary. We cannot always simply say the Judiciary are infallible. All of those prosecutions were initially upheld on appeal, despite the pleas of the innocent men and women to the effect that they were, effectively, being framed. I am not saying juries are infallible but judges are far from infallible. I think of the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, dealing with the appeal in the case of the Birmingham Six. He referred to the appalling vista that the prosecution might be based on a web of police perjury, but of course it was true.”
“We do not entrust that function normally to members of the Judiciary for very obvious reasons. One of them is that members of the Judiciary, where they become case-hardened by criminal law, tend to become – this is not a universal thing – somewhat more inured to the possibility of the innocence of the accused and to the possibility that Garda evidence and evidence brought forward by the prosecution are not to be believed. I spoke to a judge recently who told me that on the day of his appointment, just as he left his chambers to go out and take the judicial declaration, a former Chief Justice told him he had one final point to make, which was that the men in Garda uniform do not always tell the truth.”
“With criminal legal aid, the criminal process has now become far lengthier, even if we take account of the obligation to make greater disclosure than used to be the case on the part of the prosecution. The criminal process has become far lengthier than it used to be or than is necessary. We can have a reasonably lengthy but not excessively lengthy jury trial on defamation in the High Court, and we are dealing here with serious cases that merit a trial in the High Court. Judges are not infallible. The reason we retain juries in criminal cases is that we believe that people should not be sent to jail on criminal charges unless it is established in public to 12 members of the public chosen at random that the prosecution case has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.”
“I do not accept that proposition, and I also make the point, which might be taken on board, that for years I participated in criminal trials in the Dublin Circuit Court and the Central Criminal Court. Thirty years ago, jury trials in the Circuit Court lasted about two days. They were serious cases such as rape cases or serious criminal cases. They only lasted about two days because the procedures were understood by both sides to be a lot quicker, and the judges got on with the case. In those days you could not spend a week or two weeks before a jury arguing all sorts of points. There was a certain momentum to a trial by jury. I must say on the part of the legal profession, and not on their behalf, that they are partly to blame for all of this.”
“A jury has to have that explained. One of the advantages of so doing is that justice is administered in public and the parties can see precisely what instruction the jury was given in relation to the law and whether it was right or wrong or fair or unfair. Those kinds of instructions are subject to the potential to correct them on appeal, like every other judicial decision in any other case. I do not accept the proposition that jury trial is necessarily so lengthy as to make it not worthy of preservation in any aspect of law, including Garda assaults, sexual assaults, malicious falsehood, as my friend mentioned, and other things where it is going to be preserved.”
“That is not going to change but one particular version of jury determination is to be abolished simply because the newspapers have falsely argued that the only way to deal with this is to get rid of juries. The second point they raise is that jury trials are longer and more complicated because applications are made in the absence of the jury, and the jury has to have the law explained to it. Well, so what? In every criminal trial the jury has to have the law explained, where the onus of proof lies and how it should approach the evidence. We do not say that is an injustice, either to the prosecution or the accused. The same applies to every case of assault, whether a Garda assault or sexual assault, you name it. A jury has to be informed as to its function and how it approaches the evidence it is about to receive and has received.”
“Why is it therefore that the newspapers and the rest of the media have conducted a concerted campaign to convey that the only way to limit damages and to ensure that an injustice is not done on the damages front is to abolish the concept of a jury trial? It simply does not make sense. Why is it that we entrust a jury with the right to say if somebody is badly beaten up by members of An Garda Síochána, "Here is the issue paper, you determine all the issues, including aggravated or exemplary damages", which will continue to be the law? Why is it that if a woman who is an employee of a wealthy man sues him in the High Court for sexually abusing her over, say, 15 years, her jury is entitled to determine what she receives by way of compensation?”
“What is it about excessive damages that cannot be dealt with unless we get rid of juries altogether? It is illogical, it is misguided, it will not achieve what it is supposed to achieve and in the end it is a delusion that the only way to deal with excessive damages is to exclude jury trial in its entirety in defamation cases. I am not allowed to talk about my own cases but I am aware that in cases of assault by members of An Garda Síochána, the level of damages provided for is not limited by law. Assault, including sexual assault, by a person who has reached their majority against for example a child or even another adult, is determinable by a jury and is not limited in this way.”
“However, there are many alternatives to, for instance, the excessive award problem, if that is a problem, by simply providing very clear power for the judge, either alone to determine the maximum that can be awarded, or alternatively, to give to the judge and advocates for either side very clear entitlements to specify exactly what kind of damages should or should not be awarded, especially by reference to judicially ordained limits for other things. If someone breaks his or her leg, the Judiciary has collectively decided what that is worth. If a person is stopped by a store detective in a retail shop and he or she is defamed - forget about the changes we will consider later - how can that not, in most circumstances, be dealt with just as simply as giving a guideline in relation to a broken leg, ankle, hip or whatever?”
“I support the substance of Senator Ryan's amendment for a number of reasons and I echo all the arguments she made without exception. First, the newspapers of Ireland have convinced themselves that their problem with defamation law lies with juries. They have convinced themselves of that narrative and nothing will dislodge them from that conviction. They have convinced themselves that trial by jury leads to unpredictable results, excessive awards and the like.”
“These matters must be brought into the public domain and an urgent debate is required on them in this House, attended by the Minister for justice, when it resumes in September.”
“There is clear evidence that criminal and disciplinary processes have been launched to conceal major malfeasance in the management of the Garda armoury. A senior Garda officer of the utmost integrity has been sidelined for his part in raising these matters. A junior member of An Garda Síochána, also of the utmost integrity, is currently facing criminal charges on indictment, which appear to be motivated by a desire to conceal abuses in the armoury section. Senior management in An Garda Síochána is aware of all of these matters. Anyone who thinks that the culture in An Garda Síochána has been transformed by the outcome of the disclosures tribunal concerning Sergeant Maurice McCabe is, I fear, gravely mistaken. I am truly shocked by what I have learned.”
“Deputy Alan Kelly has also raised in Dáil Éireann defective holsters issued to armed members of An Garda Síochána, which appear to have been contributory factors in the death of one garda and the very serious injury caused to another. Very grave issues arise in regard to the procurement process that led to the defective holsters, which have been withdrawn, being manufactured here in Ireland to a grossly substandard level. Other very serious issues have arisen in regard to the procurement of defective ammunition by An Garda Síochána. Far more serious than any of this has been what appears to be the gross mistreatment of honest gardaí who have been affected by these matters, or who have raised them.”
“I want to raise on the Order of Business today the need for a full debate in this House on facts and circumstances, some of which have only partly emerged in the media, concerning grave issues relating to the armoury section of An Garda Síochána, which have been dealt with by An Garda Síochána and the Department of justice. There has been limited media coverage of the falsification of documents submitted by An Garda Síochána to the Department of justice, designed to facilitate the importation of firearms for civilians who are not gardaí. There has also been limited publicity in the media concerning the misuse of protected disclosures made in utmost good faith to the Department of justice concerning matters relating to the Garda armoury.”
“I recall that Mr. Shatter, in book he wrote after he lost his seat, made particular reference to the then Opposition spokesperson, Deputy Willie O'Dea, who accused him of arrogance in the course of a debate. In the book, Mr. Shatter says this is a typical antisemitic trope. Antisemitism means hatred of the Jews as Jews. Any group of people in Israel who voice concern about what is happening on the West Bank and what is happening to the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, including former prime ministers, cannot be accused of antisemitism with any credibility. Therefore, accusing the Irish Government, the Irish people, this House and this Parliament of antsemitism is totally out of order and must end.”
“I second the amendment proposed by Senator Clonan to the Order of Business. Somebody listening to the Order of Business today would be struck by the consistent expressions of horror across the House at what is happening in Gaza. The terms on which we decry it, deplore it and condemn it are very important. The accusation being made against Ireland by senior politicians in the United States, egged on by senior politicians in the Israeli Government, that Irish people who support the ending of genocide in Gaza, who support a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli issue, and who support the maintenance of human rights on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip are motivated by antisemitism, is a deep slur. As Senator Clonan said, it is a defamation against the Irish people and against their Government, and it is wholly insupportable.”
“Effectively, we now have a situation where, on a hierarchical basis, local authorities remain capable of being told not to provide enough land in their areas for the requisite housing demand but to obey a different viewpoint, which is that the NPF knows better than the people who would come to live in those homes if they were built. I am sorry to say that those figures - 100,000 homes effectively taken off what was provided for under the second last set of development plans for the greater Dublin area, in pursuit of policies in the national planning framework at that time - are a major contributory factor in the cost of housing and availability of it where people want to live.”
“It was done in the hope that people would go to live in other places and that increased zoning in those other places would attract them out of the greater Dublin area. It is no wonder we have a crisis. The crisis originated from the complete failure of the mechanisms we put in place under the planning Acts to deal with the growing population and the locations where people wish to work, live and bring up their families. We say that it is out of balance, but the people of Ireland vote with their feet. If they are given the choice, they want to live in areas where local authority members had previously made provision for them, taking a view of what was likely to happen in the property market by way of demand for housing.”
“However, where people want to live and where they are told by the national planning framework, NPF, they ought to live are two different things. The local authorities in question would not have dezoned all that land if it were not for the NPF and the supervisory function of the national Planning Regulator, which effectively cajoled them into dezoning land for 100,000 houses. We wonder why we have a housing crisis. That is the reason, as 100,000 houses could have been built on the land that was dezoned under the second last set of development plans. When we introduce this hierarchy of criteria, as the Minister mentioned earlier in the debate, and it is then policed by the Planning Regulator, the result is, as the director of Savills outlined, a reduction of 100,000 housing places in the area where the greatest demand exists.”
“In June 2022, the Irish Independent reported the then director of Savills Ireland as saying local authorities around the greater Dublin area, that is the four local authorities in Dublin county, and those in Kildare, Wicklow and Meath, had in response to the national planning framework changed their previous county development plans to reduce zoned lands by enough land to build 100,000 houses That is how the national planning framework actually works. In the greater Dublin area the affect of the NPF four years ago was to persuade local authorities to reduce the amount of land available for development by enough land to build 100,000 houses. That was done because the NPF envisaged that development would take place outside the city of Dublin and the greater Dublin commuter belt area.”
“It is some achievement that a code could be enacted with that volume of unconsidered amendments made by both Houses but deemed by virtue of guillotine resolutions to have been considered and approved by both Houses. It is the exact opposite of democracy. I have to just put this on the record.”
“Regarding housing standards, and we will probably come to it later concerning section 44B, which it is proposed to insert in Part III of the Planning and Development Act 2000, a Bill which is proposed to be repealed in its entirety by the 2024 Act. These are controversial proposals and should be the subject of detailed consideration in both Houses and they are not going to get it, like so much of the 2024 Act. For everybody's benefit, I had a researcher just look at the 2024 Act and how many individual amendments were made and never considered by either House. My researcher says that in total it came to more than 1,500 amendments.”
“I will add one thing, and that is this list of amendments to this Bill contains 21 amendments that are Government amendments. This is for a Bill that has just been guillotined through the Dáil and flung in here for our consideration under similar time pressure. In the main, these are amendments that could have been envisaged as necessary at the time when the Planning and Development Act 2024 was guillotined through this House and rushed through Dáil Éireann prior to the last general election. This is not a way to conduct parliamentary business. We do not have the explanatory memorandums for this House for these 21 amendments. The Minister is in a position to tell us what each amendment is about but we do not have a detailed account ahead of the debate as to precisely what is planned.”
“The local authority, though, is overruled and told it must have duplex-type housing densities on the land it is now proposing to zone or grant planning permission in respect of. In my view, all of that is grossly excessive. Regarding Senator Keogan's proposals in her amendments, I support them. I think it is time we said goodbye to the Office of the Planning Regulator. There are different ways to handle suspected corruption. It should be done by a Minister and the consent of these Houses. It should not be done by a so-called independent and largely autonomous officer who imposes his or her will on the democratic choices made by local authority members against the possibility that they would behave improperly or in bad faith or corruptly in relation to their decisions on zoning and in the content of their own development plan.”
“This requires, in the way things actually operate, that the Department backs it up financially when it comes to a CPO for this purpose. I agree with Senator Keogan. The OPR was a heavy-handed overreaction. It is an aggregation of power to the centre of the Department, operating through a so-called independent agency to examine in minute detail, by reference to national planning directives, frameworks and the like, and micromanage what local authority members did and do in respect of the development of their areas. I have seen other cases where, for instance, the Office of the Planning Regulator decides there have to be duplex-type developments in developments outside towns. The local authority, having consulted the developers in their area, says there is no demand in rural Ireland and in rural Irish towns for those duplex arrangements.”
“I have seen, from work I have done elsewhere, the Office of the Planning Regulator intervenes in the sequence of rezoning land outside the centres of towns of medium size. This has happened on a number of occasions. The Planning Regulator has said that in theory, the land could be rezoned but there is land closer to the centre of the town in question that should be developed first. This is all very well, except the persons who own the land nearer the town centre have no intention, for one reason or another, of carrying out any development on it. They cannot be forced to do so unless the local authority decides to CPO the land. In these circumstances we go through the entire rigmarole of having An Coimisiún Pleanála confirming a CPO regime if, as a housing authority, the local authority decides to intervene and purchase land compulsorily.”
“The members of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council were entitled to decide, and were in a far better position to decide, on what likely demand for housing there was in their area and to make their zoning decisions accordingly. It was never suggested that the rezonings directed to be rescinded by the Office of the Planning Regulator more recently were in any way tainted by corruption or suspicion as to the bona fides of the councillors who made their decisions. It was never suggested this was the case. In fairness, this has to be said. They are people who make decisions in good faith based on their calculation of what demand for housing in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown will be.”
“I do not accept the proposition that local authority members are ignorant or foolish when it comes to the zoning requirements in their area. I heard that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council was told by the Planning Regulator to dezone land in its area. It is a city area, virtually. For the Planning Regulator to say it had zoned land for housing to an excessive degree was an extraordinary proposition. The requirement it should dezone that land was made by the Planning Regulator which, we are told, is independent in the execution of its functions and is subject only to the right of a Minister to supervene again and lay before the Houses of the Oireachtas a direction to ignore the Planning Regulator. Otherwise, such a direction from the Planning Regulator takes effect. This is the direct opposite of local democracy.”
“I share Senator Keogan's reservations about the Office of the Planning Regulator. I understand what the Minister has said on it emerging from one of the recommendations of the Mahon tribunal but, with the greatest of respect, the fact the tribunal had to deal with allegations of corruption in respect of zoning and rezoning by local authority members never required something as draconian as the Office of the Planning Regulator to be established. It certainly did not require the Department giving to the Office of the Planning Regulator a power effectively to undo decisions of local authorities by fiat, subject only to an ultimate veto by a Minister, which has to be laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. It gave massive power to the Planning Regulator to undo decisions that local authority members made in good faith.”
“The head of Uisce Éireann told a conference recently that if he got the green light today to go ahead with it, 30 years later, even though it is agreed it should be done, it will be another ten years before it would be completed because of the delays associated with Irish planning law. We cannot go on living like this. We are living in cloud-cuckoo-land if we think the Planning and Development Act 2024 or the amendments we are making to it today will substantially improve what is radically wrong with the capacity of the Irish State to deliver to the people what they are entitled to, that is, decent infrastructure, decent development and a decent response to the housing crisis.”
“This Bill will be twice as large as it is now when the Irish translation comes about, and by the way it is not available as signed by the President until that is done. This is an unofficial copy. This Act and the amendments we are already making to an Act that was guillotined through these Houses is not the solution for Ireland's solutions planning-wise. It is an enshrinement of everything that is wrong in Irish planning law. It is an enshrinement, in my view, in Irish law of something that will ensure that the coming ten and 20 years will be as unproductive as the previous ten or 20 years in respect of those badly-needed projects. Take a look at the Shannon to Dublin water supply. It was planned at least 30 years ago by Dublin Corporation as it then was.”
“All of these things are now coming within the purview of An Coimisiún Pleanála, which, with the greatest of respect - and I put this on the record - will turn out as one of the greatest mistakes this country has made. If we are serious about major infrastructural developments, we should do it in a different way. We should use what continental countries are entitled to do. That is state-sponsored legislative infrastructural developments, which are not the subject of the normal planning process, which are not the material sent to An Coimisiún Pleanála and which are not in any way accountable to judicial review of the inordinate kind we have at the moment. I put those views on the record.”
“We are struggling to provide water from the Shannon to Dublin or to establish the national electricity grid in a sufficient way to deal with every kind of demand, whether domestic or data centre, that has been put in place. We are dealing with what I believe is a complete error. That is the supposition by one Department of State that An Bord Pleanála is competent to deal with every issue, from offshore wind farms to be built in the Atlantic, to motorways, to every form of compulsory purchase anywhere in the country, and even to the trivial such as if you are entitled to an overhead electrical gantry outside your house in Ranelagh to feed your car at night.”