Dr. Mary Kelly:

I had that question written down to come back to. The planning regulator will exist completely separately to An Bord Pleanála, and we will not have any formal relationship with it as such. We have not spoken to the Minister about the planning regulator, but over the years since it was mooted, we have had various discussions with the Department with responsibility for the environment, if only to tease it out in the first instance and then come to a conclusion eventually that it should be independent of An Bord Pleanála and planning authorities and should be an independent body. That is our understanding of it. I have no further information on it. I think the legislation is going through the Houses at the moment but, other than that, I understand that the regulator will have some function in examining and reviewing An Bord Pleanála's systems.

I was asked about an SDZ in Waterford. I can report that we do not have any application for an SDZ in Waterford so I can comment on that. If we did, I would not be able to comment on it.

I have been tardy in replying to Deputy Casey. He asked about mandatory time limits. It has not generally been a feature of the planning Acts for An Bord Pleanála, but a statutory objective period was introduced in 1992 which has worked well so far. We have an internal objective of meeting it 80% of the time. There will always be cases that cannot be determined within the time because we do not have the information to determine them. There is a mandatory time limit on this housing. It will be the first time we have faced one. We must put our resources into it and make sure that we meet the mandatory time limits.

My opinion on mandatory time limits is that they could hamper good development because if a decision has to be produced within a certain amount of time and there is not enough information to grant, something might be refused at that point which, with a little more information, could have been a good development and got through.