Sparks fly over An Taisce

Dublin Sinn Féin’s Larry O’Toole and Seán Crowe

The final section of the Ard Fheis was on motions dealing with democracy and accountability but was dominated by a debate on a motion from the Driver O’Boyle cumann in Wicklow condemning An Taisce’s objections to rural one-off housing.
Councillor Martin Kenny from Leitrim accused An Taisce of trying to turn rural Ireland into a wildlife reserve, saying: “There is an agenda in certain sections of Irish society to remove people from the rural countryside. People in rural Ireland need to live and work and they need homes to live in.”
The heritage organisation was supported by Mick McDonnell of Limerick, himself a member of An Taisce. “The suggestion in the motion that it is a ‘secret organisation’ is wrong,” he told delegates. “This motion is simply an attack on An Taisce that ignores all the good work it does in schools around the country. There is a need for debate on rural housing but I believe this motion uses the organisation as a whipping boy.”
He was backed by Dublin’s Mícheál Mac Donncha, who argued An Taisce plays an important role in reviewing planning applications, especially when they could impact on heritage sites of places of historical importance. He claimed it only objects to around 300 of the 3,000 applications referred to them and there was not enough evidence to support the motion.
But he and other opponents of the motion were accused of living in a fantasy world by Gerry O’Neill from Wicklow, who claimed that An Taisce objected to 90 per cent of one-off housing applications in west Wicklow. He accused the organisation of failing to get involved when Dublin City Council was proposing to blow up cyanide cylinders next to a feeder stream for the Liffey and instead devoted its resources to fighting one-off housing.
The motion condemning An Taisce was passed by a large majority.
Delegates also debated motions calling for the reform or abolition of the Seanad. Paul O’Connor of Cork City Comhairle Ceantar started it off, declaring that “crony politics leads to crony capitalism”.
“We don’t just have rotten politicians. We have a rotten political system with political leaders who could have stepped out of Killinaskully. If attending funerals was an Olympic sport what a team we could field from Leinster House.”
He was followed by the party’s Dáil leader, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD, who opposed a motion calling for the abolition of the Seanad, saying it didn’t go far enough.
“We are for abolition of the current undemocratic Seanad,” he said. “But we support a new, directly elected, second chamber as part of democratic reform that will see a reduction in the voting age, expanded voting rights for non-citizens and a role for the Irish diaspora.
Elsewhere in the session Councillor Seán Crowe from Tallaght criticised new changes to the voter registration system in the South. “These procedures have had the effect of disenfranchising thousands of eligible voters, with a disproportionate and discriminatory impact on voters in working class estates,” he said. “In my own constituency of Dublin South West six and a half thousand voters disappeared off the register.”