Mr. Niall Cussen:

Those are ultimately matters of policy for the Minister and the Department. I am not going to be drawn on so-called serial objectors and so on. That is for the Oireachtas.

If we have time Ms O'Connor might say something on density. I would not want this to be seen as our response to the Wexford development plan but the Office of the Planning Regulator is not insisting on apartments or duplexes in various rural or small town locations. All we require is a broad consistency with the Minister's own guidelines. They refer to an average density of around 35 dwellings to the hectare, which is about making effective use of building land that is extremely expensive to service. We were just talking about the Irish Water issue a minute ago. Most people listening to this might wonder what 35 dwellings to a hectare looks like. It is like a modern, 1990s of 2000s housing development, which is different from the much lower density estates of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. It is wrong to say that it is getting into apartments, duplexes and so on. Our assessment of some of the development plans recently have concluded that local authorities are actually putting quite average or low densities into their development plans so that they can then use it as a basis to zone more land in a more extensive, sprawled approach around towns and villages. When the Minister's guidelines seek an average of 35 dwellings per hectare for that category of towns, we have to point out that a development plan that is founded on the basis of promoting densities of 25 dwellings to the hectare or less is not in broad compliance with the guidelines. That is not to say that one might lower the densities in one particular part of a town or village because of the nature of the character of the area, and increase it in another, that is all envisaged in the Minister's guidelines, we are just pointing that out. We are not in the business of setting policy, we are in the business of ensuring that it is reflected. Ms O'Connor might like to comment on that Wexford-type point.