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

When we had this discussion at the committee the last day, only two days before that, a municipal district committee of a local authority prevented a Part 8 from going to Part 8, following a dispute. Part of the difficulty - I want to emphasise the Minister of State's point - is that it is either at the informal discussions between managers and councillors, or at the area or municipal district, which managers, as the committee knows, use as a kind of filter before they go to formal process, that things are dying, for whatever reason. That is the difficulty.

RTÉ was looking to do a programme some time ago and asked this very question. It had a researcher going around the country trying to track the number of stalled processes. It is really difficult. We all know how managers work on any Part 8s, no matter what they are for. They talk to the local councillors first, they get a read of the political temperature and they try to sense whether something will progress or not. Most of the time those things are not even minuted or recorded. That is important.

To go back to the issue of the regulator, I do not care who perform the role - this is the really important thing - but there has to be a mechanism whereby if there are changes to the Part 8 and section 183 powers, and if a manager is not using those powers, there has to be statutory enforceability because somebody has to be able to intervene on foot of a complaint from the national Traveller accommodation consultative committee or this committee as it tracks this issue and require that something be done.

There has to be statutory enforceability because somebody has to be able to intervene on foot of a complaint from the national Traveller accommodation consultative committee or this committee as it tracks this issue and require that something be done.

To respond to Deputy Casey's point, if I understand it correctly, and the Minister and his officials will correct me if I am wrong, the difficulty is that we know the local authorities are not spending the money they have but nobody has the statutory authority to step in and force them to spend it. That is the problem. If the regulator is the right mechanism to do it, as has been recommended, that will be brilliant. However, the Minister can also come back and say he has found a more efficient and effective way to do this, provided some entity is able to step in when a local authority does not deliver X number of units, as promised under its Traveller plan, within, say, the first 12 months and tell it how it must do so. There should be proper consultation and members of the public and elected Members should have an opportunity to give their views, as is the case with any Part 8 development. Deputy Casey is absolutely right. In some instances, the issue is elected Members, while in others it is managers or someone else. We have to make sure that whatever package of interventions we put together, it can address all of those elements. That is not an impossible task, even in the short space of time available.