Ms Joan Martin:

The chief executive can only grant planning permission in accordance with the county development plan. That is a legal fact. Much depends on how it is worded in the county development plan and whether it becomes a material contravention. Strictly speaking, the county development plan governs decisions on planning applications. That is how it is but perhaps I was not clear on it earlier.

I would caution against an idea that the county development plan is the solution to every problem and that it provides the space where one can solve all these problems. As I stated in my opening statement, there are other instruments that also must be used. In general terms, so many takeaways are there already. We discussed earlier this issue of ancillary uses, etc. Apart from the potential downsides for small towns and villages of restrictions that are black and white, I feel that sometimes we are trying to use the county development plan to do things that in law it was never meant to do. As Mr. Ryan stated earlier, it is largely about spatial planning. While one might put objectives about health and other matters into the plan, it is not its primary purpose. That is the difficulty.

In broad terms, a planning application decision has to be made in accordance with the development plan. If the committee looks at the four examples I gave, the wording is entirely different. How they are put into the plan and where they are put, and their status within the plan, could be entirely different. It is just not black and white. There is not a way of making it simple or straightforward to necessarily achieve the kind of objective that the members here would like to think it could.