The Mahon tribunal has completed its task in identifying corruption in the planning system and the Government should now legislate on a number of fronts to tackle the problem. Gordon Deegan reports.
That is the view of barrister Mr Colm MacEochaidh whose placing of a newspaper advertisement seeking information on corruption in the planning process ultimately led to the establishment of the Flood Tribunal in 1997.
Now, Mr MacEochaidh told the annual Burren Law School at Ballyvaughan's Burren College of Art at the weekend: "Close down the tribunals if necessary, maybe they are too expensive, we now have identified the mischief, now let's fix it."
He said: "The tribunal was not established to be an instrument of idle curiosity to see if Bertie Ahern attended a meeting in Leinster House. It was established to tell the legislature what the problem is.
"The tribunal has done that, we have had our value from it. It has done its job and in that context, the Mahon tribunal is now redundant." Mr MacEochaidh said that he has no regrets over the establishment of the Flood-Mahon tribunal.
However, he said: "It is a cause of significant regret to me that more than one year after Justice Flood's damning report on the extent and level of corruption in the planning process that the Government has made no legislative initiatives on the corruption identified."
He said: "Nothing has happened, except for a Government Bill to address the public anger about the tribunals' cost and the actual issues have not been addressed."
Mr MacEochaidh said that three initiatives need to follow from the corruption uncovered: the establishment of a national body to vet rezoning decisions by councillors; the setting up of an anti-corruption commission; and the need to break the link between money and politics.
Mr MacEochaidh said that the establishment of a national land use commission would certify that rezonings complied with local development plans and the National Spatial Strategy.
He said rezoning "is an extraordinary power to give to councillors who are on a small salary, the temptation for corruption is enormous and it has been given into on a large scale up and down the country".
Mr MacEochaidh said that an anti-corruption commission could conduct its investigations in private and if corruption was found to have taken place, prosecutions should follow.
On the subject of one-off housing, he dismissed the contention that there is a blanket prohibition on one-off housing.
On comments made by the Minister for the Environment to the Fianna Fáil ardfheis, Mr MacEochaidh said: "What blanket prohibition was Minister Cullen referring to? Seventy to 75 per cent of all applications for one-off homes are being granted, while 40 per cent of house completions last year were one-off housing."
Ireland was now a car-based society as average annual mileage was higher than in the US, UK and Germany, he said.