Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will respond, in particular, to some of Deputy Ó Broin's comments.

I made the comparison with a beefed up chief planner's office in the Department. That is in the context of the recommendation for a Minister to intervene in terms of a local area plan or whatever. We have had this discussion in the Department. The question has been put to me: "What if one gets a pig-headed Minister who says that councillors in this area have made this decision, we should respect that, and he or she is not accepting their recommendation?" There is the potential for a Minister to do that and to ignore officials' advice, and for that not to be exposed publicly because the interaction between a Minister and his or her officials is not always subject to FOI as it is often in form of conversations in meetings. A Minister has the power to be able to say: "Do not put that in writing. I am not accepting it. We are moving on here. Nothing to see." That would be totally inappropriate but possible under the current system.

The difference here is that we have an independent office of planning regulator that is making an assessment that there is something inappropriate here, that is publishing that, and that has made that judgment and sent it back to the local authority stating that in the office's view, the local authority has made an inappropriate decision and should do something about it, and that is publicly available for everybody to see. Then the office makes a report to the Minister stating that it warned this local authority that it should be not doing what it is doing, the local authority has given the office reasons but the office does not accept them, and the Minister needs to take this into account. It is not possible for a Minister to say "nothing to see here" on that basis because it is not the same as the interaction that happens sometimes between a Minister and his or her own planning authority in the Department. It is an independent regulatory office making an assessment and making a recommendation, that the Minister will have to respond to in writing, that will also be published and on which the Minister can be questioned.

I agree that we need to change the current system in terms of accountability of the Minister which is what Deputy Ó Broin is getting at here. However, it would not be fair to describe what we are doing here as still allowing a Minister to be blind to good planning decisions because if the Minister is, the political system in Ireland is fairly abrasive when decisions are being questioned by the Opposition, media, etc. The only question is whether that is how we should deal with this in terms of transparency and accountability or should we go down the route of giving the regulator all the power. We have landed on the side of the fence whereby democratic accountability, scrutiny and transparency should be the final decision-making structure here as opposed to a regulator who essentially merely takes this decision out of the Minister's office altogether.

By the way, I note we must be cautious about naming names but we have had tribunals who have named names very publicly. There is nothing secret about this. We have had a planning system in Ireland that has been fundamentally corrupted in the past, in particular, at a zoning level in terms of area plans, etc., with very inappropriate developments happening on the back of that which have impacted on the quality of life of thousands of people.

I take Deputy Casey's point. I would have been a member of Cork County Council putting together a county development plan 12 or 13 years ago. The process is now different but it is still not perfect by a long shot. The pressure that councillors get exposed to from vested interests, in terms of land zoning, etc., is still not as it should be. I would like to have the recommendations of an independent planning regulator, for example, looking at guidelines and appropriate ways in which meetings should be held and looking at physical separation between those who are making decisions and those who are trying to influence those decisions. Those are the kind of matters on which the new regulator's office can make strong recommendations. Having said that, the process is a lot cleaner than it was previously.

The view that we are taking here is that the buck stops with the Minister, but that all of the factors which influence the Minister's decision are very public with regard to transparency, accountability and availability of information for everybody to look at. On balance, that is probably a better approach than simply saying that the Minister is not capable of making these decisions and cannot be trusted and therefore everything should be handed over to a regulator's office. That is where we are.