Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There is a misconception on the part of the Department with regard to this part of the regulation. The Minister talks about appeals processes as if everything that happens in the airport that has a noise implication goes through the planning process first, life goes on as normal and nothing happens outside either the noise plan that is produced every couple of years or the planning application when some major change is proposed and people have an input under Part 3 of the Act. This legislation is about how the noise regulator does its job. The Minister asks how the noise regulator would know whether there is an impact from noise. At the moment, the Bill provides that the noise regulator can only intervene when the DAA goes to it. There is no facility for a resident to do so. What happens if there is a change to aircraft noise testing? I live in River Valley and planes keep me awake at night. There is no mechanism to address this because the matter falls outside the review that takes place every couple of years and the planning application. I feel I am being negatively impacted by noise. As this is specified, there is no route for me to go to the competent authority because the role of the competent authority is only to assess applications that come from the DAA, not from residents. I thought the Minister would go along with this amendment because I thought the current provision was a clear oversight. I did not think it was a big deal.

I take the point that amendment No. 48 may be over prescriptive. My thinking on that one was that the competent authority may, at its discretion, comply with the request.

What I was doing there was trying to make sure that the competent authority at least dealt with the application. I did not want to prescribe a big unwieldy process as to how it would deal with the assessment. What I meant was that the competent authority would not be able to simply ignore the application. It would at least have to write back to the person making the application and let him or her know that the authority was not invoking the procedure for whatever reason. That was all I was thinking of. I was not stating the authority would be obliged to invoke the whole 18-month aspect or anything like that. Perhaps I did not get the balance right on that one.