Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If I understand it correctly, the real issue here is that a regional assembly will have four weeks to publish its strategy. I presume that four weeks is to allow the assembly to edit the document, ensure it is composited, etc. The difficulty is that if people want to challenge a spatial strategy - let us hope they do not, but let us imagine that there is some very compelling legal reason why they would want to - they will have an eight-week window for judicial review. If the strategy is not going to published for four weeks, that will eat into the eight-week window.

The question is whether this complies with our obligations under the Aarhus Convention. Have the Minister or the officials sought specific advice from the Attorney General to ensure that it is? What we do not want is a challenge on foot of people not being able to have that adequate amount of time to assess the strategy document. Again, none of this is about encouraging judicial reviews. It is to make sure that the process is legally robust. These are not like local area plans. They are not short documents; they are quite long and complex. If it is eating into half of the window available to launch a judicial review and if people feel they could very well have very strong environmental or public health grounds for seeking to mount a challenge, then surely they should be given the full eight weeks and not what essentially could be four weeks as a result of the fact that it will take four weeks to publish the final plan. That is the nub of the issue. Obviously, we all accept that on the night a county development plan is agreed, a great deal of work will have to be done in terms of making sure that the published version is correct and proper. The impact of a four-week publication schedule on the timeline or window for judicial review is the potential here in the context of our obligations under the Aarhus Convention.