Planning decisions - Reform this sad, shabby business

THERE are few areas where the conflict between private property rights and the ability of a community to protect its best interests come into sharper conflict than under our planning laws and culture.

There is no area that shows our political system in a poorer light than the shabby, conflict-of-interest skullduggery that passes for planning management through local democracy.

More than one in five councillors deal in or develop land through their day jobs as auctioneers, landowners or builders. In Mayo and Offaly that figure is almost one in two and, in eight other counties, it is at least one in three. So, in a significant proportion of our local authorities, at least a third of elected representatives are in the property business.

Either there’s something in it for these professions becoming a public representative or they are an especially civic-minded group. Make up your own mind.

The Standards in Public Office Commission keeps records of politicians’ assets and business interests in an effort to identify potential conflicts of interest. But amazingly, and in a typically fetching Irish solution to an Irish problem, it is up to individual politicians to make declarations to the commission. Even more amazingly, information supplied to it is not independently verified. No spot checks then to worry that iconic Irish figure — Councillor Auctioneer.

Maybe somebody thought that there would be no need, that all those fine ’fellas would sooner lose a commission fee rather than misuse their position.

This is yet another example of well-intentioned legislation being made irrelevant by a lack of enforcement or policing. After a decade of Flood and Mahon it is hard to imagine that this oversight was accidental.

The same Councillor Auctioneer can phone a council official to put the squeeze on them to reverse a planning refusal in the knowledge that the phone call will never be noted on the relevant file. That the interest expressed will remain secret and hidden from public scrutiny for ever.

In one of the glaring weakness in the chain that leads to a planning decision, it is possible for a third party — auctioneer, politician or candle-stick maker — to verbally contact an official and try to exert influence in the knowledge that no record will be kept of that call.

According to An Taisce, Danish law takes a sterner view. “In Denmark if a councillor intervened behind the scenes to influence a planning or rezoning decision it would be considered corruption — a criminal offence — but here it’s the norm,” suggested the watchdog.

Every single representation — no matter who from, or whether written or verbal — made regarding any planning decision should be recorded and made public.

If you want another example of another well-intention project, undermined by an inability to enforce its decisions and launched with great fanfare and promise, look no further than the National Spatial Strategy.

Published in 2002 the document was designed to bring unity to development policies. The conduits for this innovative approach were to be the regional authorities — the super-councils through which neighbouring counties might co-operate.

The process was stymied from day one though: the regional authorities don’t have planning staff but have to second scarce planners from local authorities to draw up guidelines that the local authorities are under no legal obligation to observe.

Like the commission so, a fine proposal rendered no more than a PR gimmick because neither initiative was given the big stick it needed to complete its mandate.

Any consideration of the issues would lead to a dis-spiriting conclusion but the reality is we voted for Councillor Auctioneer and it is we who phone him when it suits us. If we want to change the system we have to participate in it, after all democracy without participation is just a theory, an empty process.

Now there’s a new year’s resolution worth taking up and talking about.