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

I move amendment No. 33:

In page 10, to delete lines 31 and 32.

There are three elements to this group of amendments. The first amendment is amendment No. 33 and refers to the provision in the Bill that where An Bord Pleanála refuses an application then any fee received from the prospective applicant for the purposes of this section would be returned. I have two problems with this. First, all of the effort and work of An Bord Pleanála, the local authority and others on the application, would not be recompensed with regard to the fees provided. Also, in the same way that the Minister, Deputy Coveney, earlier defended the penalty that An Bord Pleanála would have to pay for late decisions, not returning this fee would be an equally fair penalty for an applicant and would discourage the making of a bad application. It is all the better that the sums of money involved in fees could be quite significant because the bigger the sum of money the better the application will be if the applicant knows they will not get the fee back. I feel strongly about this.

The next eight amendments are all of a similar nature and they are about providing greater access to information or giving slightly longer periods of time for public consultation throughout the process. With regard to amendment No. 43, if a person feels that their only course of action is to seek a judicial review, there is a huge amount of confusion as to whether the point at which they seek a judicial review is the legally appropriate point. This applies to ordinary planning applications as well as in this case. I am not trying to encourage or champion the applications for judicial reviews but if there was clarity on the matter it would assist everybody. It would ensure that people would not apply for judicial reviews when it is not legally appropriate, and where people felt compelled - for whatever reason - to apply or felt it was their only course of action at least they would know when to do it. There are three different sets of issues in the amendments.