Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09 ============================================================ Niall Blaney (FF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Minister of State. I will address a few of the issues raised by other speakers, although perhaps not the last one, because I did not hear any ideas in that speech. I very much welcome the national planning strategy and what is contained in this Bill. As someone from rural Ireland and a coastal region, I believe the ideas behind this Bill are very welcome and will help to sustain rural Ireland. I listened to the Sinn Féin representative talk about the GAA and rural housing. I have never heard Sinn Féin welcome the national planning strategy. I was in the Chamber a number of months ago when Senator McCormack asked the Minister, Deputy Calleary, not to work with Tata Consultancy Services in relation to the auto-enrolment scheme, which I thought was disgraceful. It has created and supports 1,000 jobs in Donegal. Many of those workers are from rural Ireland. Many of those workers are in the GAA. If we really want to support rural Ireland, we need to get real about what we need to support and want to support. There are two issues that I want to address with the Minister of State in the short time that I have. I have been harping on about these two issues for some time, but I feel they can and should be addressed, and that it is in our interest to address them. The first concerns national secondary roads. For planning purposes, I accept it cannot be addressed under this Bill, but it is work that the Department and the Minister, Deputy Browne, need to look at. National secondary routes are treated the same as national primary routes from the point of view of planning and the restrictions that are applied. Many of our national secondary routes have a lower annual average of daily traffic than some of our regional routes. I ask that we examine the top five or ten routes. The local authorities have the daily traffic data for all of these other regional routes. If we take the top five or ten regional routes, get the annual average for daily traffic and set it as a bar, we can compare that with the national secondary routes that drop below that bar. The N56 runs from Letterkenny to Creeslough and on to Donegal town. The N59 starts in Sligo and runs through Mayo before coming into Galway. There are many parts of those routes that have low average traffic. We should allow planning to take place on those routes. That is the avenue to do it. It is a safe way of doing it, and it needs to be done. The second issue concerns wastewater systems. When we go to an architect or engineer and ask them to design a new house to build, we trust the architect or engineer to design the house. More recently, we have given them powers to ensure that vision lines are sufficient. Moreover, the architect has to sign off on the development, sign off on the vision lines and ensure the building is done according to what was in their plans. Otherwise, their reputation comes into question. We need to deal with that issue regarding wastewater systems. Local authorities are spending too much time dealing with them. We need to start giving authority to the professionals - the engineers and the architects. When they design a system, rather than having this decided by people in planning offices who are not qualified to say "Yes" or "No", we should put the onus back on the engineers. They are designing the system to the standards set down. We are putting our trust in them. When they sign off on a house, they are signing off on the system and the vision lines. The responsibility lies with them. That is what their insurance covers them for. That is the way to approach this because it will safeguard us in relation to wastewater systems into the future, whether they are Puraflo or septic tank systems. I believe that would be the smart way forward. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:11+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-09