Rural Planning: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

The Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, my Déise colleague, is just gone out the door. Knowing him for many years, he has always been a very proactive public representative. I am not a bit surprised that he engineered and drove these changes. I welcome them. Well done to him and his team in the Custom House.
This morning, as Senator Scahill mentioned, we were over with the INTO. It signalled to us a great demise of local schools. The numbers are quite frightening. Only this week one was flagged in Waterford, Knockmahon, in the vicinity of Bunmahon. A lot of that is concomitant with the rigours of the planning system. Everybody here who has been a councillor, and maybe indeed many who have not, will have found that there are difficulties in this business of building on the land, on the holding. It is great to see there is some leniency coming into that because we will lose our schools. As Senator Kennelly said, there will be the decimation of the GAA and other things that are very much part of the rich rural landscape and environment we have.
These changes are very welcomed by me and, I sense, by the rest of the House.
It is a serious wedge made in that difficulty that we have had over the years with the Planning Regulator, the lack of consistency and all of those daft things that impacted on our lives as councillors trying to get something that was reasonable. Back in the day, we used to talk in the ranganna Gaeilge about banú na tuaithe. We had the same thing in Scotland between 1750 and 1850 where the clearances took place. Effectively, we were engineering our own clearances. We were not using the landlords to do it at all. We should be delighted that we have an antidote to it now.
I did take my two minutes, go raibh maith agaibh.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-10