Government hypocrisy is transparent

Minister for the Environment Martin Cullen yesterday defended the imposition of local authority levies as something that has been in place since 1964.

"Any developer that is going to develop an area obviously has to pay for the facilities that the local authority is going to have to provide," he argued. But he emphasised that anyone who is buying a new house is not going to be faced with a bill from the local authority.

"This is to pay for the facilities to develop a site," Mr Cullen explained, "so we are levying this on the developers themselves, but what the problem was heretofore was that there is no transparency in this."