Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O'Brien for his questions and for his non-partisan support for measures which he independently judges to be good. He is very public in his support for them and I appreciate that. We have several problems and I have taken quite an interest in this, given my own background as an architect and that I worked in that area. We had problems, which we have now solved to a certain extent, in the way in which the Department's building unit appointed architects. Then, the Department's architectural technical section second-guessed how it was doing its job. On the basis that if one has a dog one does not bark, we now have a different relationship with the design teams and hopefully that will speed up the process. There are other areas under our control in respect of procurement, which we are trying to streamline. It takes between two and four months to appoint a design team under European rules of procurement. I am absolutely convinced that our colleagues in Portugal, Spain and particularly France and Greece are adhering as rigidly to the standards of procurement as we are. There seems to be something in the ether of Tullamore that makes them adhere very strictly to those standards. I think we need to speed things up, but that is only part of the solution.

We are having great difficulty getting planning permission from local authorities. We have memorandums of understanding with the administrative staff. There are administrative staff in Tullamore, as distinct from technical staff, negotiating for site acquisition, but the delivery of that can be problematic. I know the Deputy is a former member of a local authority and will be able to understand this from his own experience. With the exception of Deputy McConalogue, who I think was not a member of a local authority-----