Pat Casey
Labour Panel · Fianna Fáil · Ireland
“As the time permitted for this debate has expired, I am required to put the following question in accordance with the order of the Senate of this day: "That section 29 is hereby agreed to in Committee; in respect of each of the sections of, the section is hereby agreed to in Committee; the Title is hereby agreed to in Committee; the Bill…”
“Amendment No. 9 has been ruled out of order as a potential charge on Revenue. I will read out the reasons for refusal. Amendment No. 9 would delete subsection (5) and insert section 10A completely.”
“I was in my office when I heard a lot of GAA talk, so I said I could not miss this opportunity, as a man from Wicklow, which does not often get the privilege to play in Croke Park. To actually walk the steps of the Hogan stand and to lift the Tailteann Cup was a huge day for Wicklow.”
“Amendment No. 20 has been ruled out of order as it is in conflict with the principle of the Bill. Senator Harmon wants me to read out the reason. Amendment No. 20 would require the Minister to cause an equality impact assessment to be carried out before the commencement of a specified section of the Act by a commencement order.”
“As it is now 8.15 p.m., I am required to put the following question in accordance with the Order of the Seanad of this day: "That amendment No.”
“There is a huge deficit in public transport in Wicklow, whether for bus, rail or road. Today, I acknowledge the work of the Wicklow GAA, the county board, the management team, the players and, indeed, the sponsorship, which was a deal I had a hand in putting together three years ago.”
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“The Finance (Provision of Access to Cash Infrastructure) Bill 2024 is a necessary and forward-thinking law. It will ensure our cash infrastructure remains strong and accessible to everyone, adapting to society's changing needs. There is no better example of this than the recent power failure in Spain and Portugal, which highlighted the critical importance of having access to cash. During that outage, many people were unable to make electronic payments, underscoring the vulnerability of a cashless society. This incident demonstrates why maintaining a robust cash infrastructure is essential to financial resilience and inclusion.”
“The Central Bank will check compliance quarterly and enforce measures to ensure the rules are followed. It will prepare regular reviews and reports and the Minister for Finance can update the rules as necessary. The Minister for Finance can regulate ATM fees to prevent excessive charges to ensure financial inclusion. ATM operators and cash-in-transit providers must be authorised and supervised by the Central Bank to ensure service resilience without undue burdens. The Central Bank will conduct and publish cost-benefit analyses of the proposed regulations to ensure they are justified and beneficial. Recent changes to the Bill have redefined definitions to allow for electronic communication making the legislation more robust and future proof.”
“The Minister for Finance can set rules to keep cash infrastructure at the same level it was at in 2022 by making sure a certain percentage of people are within 5 km to 10 km of an ATM, keeping a minimum number of ATMs per 100,000 of population and ensuring a certain percentage of people are within 5 km to 10 km of cash service points such as bank branches or post offices. The Central Bank of Ireland will review cash access after each census. If cash demands drop significantly or if the Minister for Finance so requests, population changes and cash demand shifts will be considered to allow the Minister to update the rules as needed. Major banks will be responsible for meeting the cash access rules. The Bill addresses local problems where cash access might be difficult. The Central Bank will guide and direct entities to fix these issues.”
“I welcome the Minister of State to the House and wish him the best of luck with his brief. This important Bill comes from the 2022 retail banking review and aims to ensure everyone in the country can easily access cash which is an essential part of daily life. The Bill aims to ensure everyone can access cash easily, makes changes to cash infrastructure fairly and transparently and includes cash-in-transit providers and independent ATM operators under the Central Bank of Ireland regulation.”
“The language that is used in the roadmap will be critical if we are going to overcome this because there are opportunities. We need to sweat the assets where we have the assets. We need to follow the population where the assets are today, not where they might be in ten years' time, while preventing towns to grow.”
“With regard to the whole area of democracy, this has completely removed the power of the councillors. We have left them with absolutely no flexibility. I will revert back to the Wicklow town plan that has just been amended. Councillors proposed 14 amendments to that county development plan. Eight of them were to zone R2 lands to R1 because we had already reached our targets. Every one of the 14 amendments the councillors proposed has come back from the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR, with the administration saying it exceeds core strategy. It comes back to this single table in a document that is so prescriptive. Even though those towns I mentioned have the services and transport, we are saying they cannot build houses there because they are exceeding the population target within that document.”
“In fact, when we adopted our 2022 county development plan, 16 of our 21 towns were already exceeding this 2031 target. We need to make sure that does not happen again. We need to make sure we allocate population growth to where we have the infrastructure today. There is no point, while we have it, waiting ten years and then using it. The other example was in Arklow in Wicklow. We just spent €149 million on a brand new wastewater treatment plant. It increased the population growth by another 22,500. The NPF is telling us we can build 80 houses per year for the next ten years. At that rate of going, it will take us 154 years to reach the capacity of the new wastewater treatment plant. That is the example. We should be able to take the population from where we cannot deliver it into areas where we can deliver it.”
“We need to focus in and take account, and maybe leave some discretion for our local councillors to manipulate those figures. In Wicklow, we have now refused five significant planning applications for residential developments, two of which, sadly, were on core strategy, because they exceeded the population target of that town. In Wicklow town now, where we are, we have refused two planning applications on R2 lands despite all the R1 lands having been completed on the very same site. We are currently now doing a variation of the Wicklow town environs plan, which is only allowing us to grow the population by an additional 3,000 until 2031. I can tell the Minister of State right now that those houses are already being built, so before we even adopt this new plan, our population figures are out of date.”
“I will probably focus in on that later. Around that population, we must get it right. Let us not make the development plan so prescriptive that it is preventing the delivery of housing. With regard to the distribution of population, Niall and I had a humdinger on this many years ago and I still cannot accept it today. Fine, I fully understand and appreciate we need our levels - level 1, level 2 and level 3 towns. However, there is absolutely no point in allocating 32% of a county's population growth to a level 1 town that does not have the infrastructure required to deliver that population growth, while in the same county there are other towns that have the infrastructure available and that can deliver but are capped because they are at a much lower percentage population growth.”
“In the area of population, I recognise that the revised NPF projects an additional 950,000 in population growth up to 2040. This does not correlate with objective No. 42, which is to deliver 50,000 houses per annum per year to 2040. The average household size according to the census was 2.74. If we even take a lower figure of 2.4, that is a population of 1.68 million. There is a significant difference there and we need to try to focus in on how we address that. I already accept that the roadmap can introduce the headroom space, which in the current one is 50%. However, even if we look at the 50% that is in the current one, in my constituency and in Leinster, the population exceeded in 2022 what was projected in 2026. We cannot allow that to happen again because that has unintended consequences, specifically in Wicklow.”
“This was the enforcer of the NPF. This has led to complications and possibly over-prescribed figures and too much of an onus on a core strategy and a table within a development plan. I have no issue whatsoever with the general policies within the NPF. The strategy of compact growth whereby we want to try to achieve 40% nationally - 50% in the cities and 30% elsewhere - is a good policy. However, that policy is protracted and takes a lot longer. We are dealing with brownfield sites and we could be dealing with sites with environmental issues. It takes a lot longer to deliver on that. Perhaps when the Government is looking at reviewing its housing policy, it might look to see what is necessary to actually deliver that because that is where we would create a sustainable environment.”
“As a Senator who participated throughout the entire process of the current NPF, I vividly recall my engagement with Niall Cussen, my concerns around the population target, the population distribution, its misalignment of infrastructure availability, the necessity for local flexibility and the top-down approach in adopting county development plans. I will raise some of the issues I raised then that are pertinent to the discussion today. These concerns must be addressed in the roadmap to ensure successful implementation. I was a member of the Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage when the first NPF was introduced. The significant difference between the NPF and the national spatial strategy was that it was put on a legal footing. This was significant. After that, the Office of the Planning Regulator was set up.”
“It will guide the actions of a wide range of public and private entities, including home builders, the renewable energy sector, infrastructure agencies and domestic and international investors. Ireland is in dire need of a significant shift in housing delivery. With the revised NPF and the new Planning and Development Act being implemented this year, we are ensuring that the essential conditions for accelerated delivery of new homes are embedded within our planning system. The need to accelerate housing delivery is paramount and this is where I wish to make some observations and express concerns regarding the NPF, particularly the implication roadmap that will follow this publication. This roadmap will contain the prescribed details necessary for effective execution.”
“I welcome the Minister of State and wish him the best of luck in his role. Hopefully, he will bring the energy he brought to the Senate when we had housing debates to his current position. Fianna Fáil supports this motion to approve the revised NPF. This framework is set to create the conditions necessary for accelerated housing delivery across Ireland. This approval follows a thorough revision process of the NPF that has been ongoing since June 2023. This milestone decision sets a clear direction for Ireland's growth and development up to 2040. It establishes a policy environment designed to unlock potential and address critical priorities, particularly in housing, infrastructure and climate action. The revised NPF will directly inform the broader Government policy agenda.”
“I move: That Seanad Éireann approves the Final Draft Revised National Planning Framework, as approved by the Government on 8th April 2025; a copy of which was laid before Seanad Éireann on 22nd April 2025 together with the Strategic Environmental Assessment Environmental Report, the Post-Consultation Natura Impact Statement, the Post-Consultation Strategic Flood Risk Assessment Report, and the Appropriate Assessment Determination.”
“It was national policy and the Office of the Planning Regulator that prevented all those lands being zoned. It was because of national policy. To come now and try to blame councillors and county council officials for not being proactive in land zoning is completely disrespectful.”
“It is national policy and national legislation that prevents our councillors from zoning land and controlling the zoning of land. It was the NPF that decided what the national population growth was. It was the regional assemblies that then dictated where that population growth went into our counties. It was national policy that decided the headroom in relation to zoning of land. The quantum of land zoned in a county development plan has nothing to do with councillors but has everything to do with national policy. It is disrespectful if a Government source is now trying to blame councillors and county councils for not having the prerequisite zoned land in place. In every one of the counties I visited in respect of the previous plans, every one of the councillors made proposals for the zoning of land.”
“Senator Duffy touched on the issue I will raise. The headline of an article in yesterday's Irish Independent , written by Fionnán Sheahan, stated that targeted zoning of land by councillors for large-scale housing will be overruled. According to the article, a Government source stated that "Local councillors and TDs can often be to the forefront in objecting to the building of houses or rezoning of land as they side with "Nimby" objectors." It gets worse. The article continues: "You can't be limited by what a local authority wants to do on zoning. Councillors are a law unto themselves. Local authorities will have to be directed on where to zone land," a government source said. A Government source who understood anything about how a county development plan is adopted would not make that statement.”
“As the programme for Government outlined, the areas of disabilities, mental health, older people and digital transformation are the specific areas we need to focus on and nobody disagrees. We need Ministers of State to track all of that as well.”
“If we look at the role for my colleague in relation to trade promotion, AI and digital transformation, AI could warrant and deserve a Minister in its own right if we take it from a security and safety point of view and the opportunities it will give this country moving forward. Everybody in the room here might have met people from Age Friendly Ireland. They had a campaign to have a Minister for older people. Nobody denies a Minister for older people is not needed in a modern society. All the Taoiseach is proposing is we extend the Ministers of State by an additional three to spread the responsibilities so we in government can take responsibility for delivery in those sectors. I fully support this proposal today and I look forward to seeing the delivery of the results of the appointment of the additional Ministers of State.”
“I also welcome the Minister today and wish him well in his new role in public expenditure and reform. The purpose of today's Bill has already been outlined. It is to increase the number of Ministers of State up to 23. Anybody who lives in a modern, complex society must understand that the challenges increase daily and there is a need to split roles and responsibilities. This is what the Taoiseach has outlined. It is a very strong programme for Government that needs to be implemented. To implement that successfully, we need key people over strategic areas in it. Even within that, we could look at it and say we need to break it down even further.”