Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that Deputy Gould shared time. I apologise if anyone can hear any sound in the background. I am in a committee room in the convention centre and someone thought it would be a good idea to put the volume on full.

I thank the Minister of State and his officials. We obviously welcome the amendments on section 254. I want to ask a couple of questions on section 254. It is very welcome that this is a means across all local authorities to ensure there is a single mode for NBI to deal with every local authority. The process will be the exact same. We all know that from time to time things can depend on whether one is dealing with a really good planning officer in a particular local authority. We could not leave that to chance for major strategical infrastructural projects such as this.

That part of the process is welcome. It went into operation some time in May. I remember speaking to NBI about it three weeks later. It said it was too early to tell, but it was somewhat supportive of it. I understand that it engineered a solution.

It had a problem in relation to road-opening licences. It is straightforward. If 20 poles are needed and one needs to be moved on-site, a new road-opening licence is needed which creates a hold-up of between two and 12 weeks. They got around this by, where they might have needed ten, putting in planning for 20 and building in redundancy. Some of that is making up for the fact there is a problem in local authorities. I have heard from Vodafone and others that planning in local authorities is not set up for major infrastructural projects. It needs to be looked at across the board. The perfect solution for them was a permitting system whereby they would be able to put in a plan and, if there were alterations, they could be done on the fly. Everything would still have to be signed off at the end, which would cover some of what Deputy Cian O'Callaghan was talking about. Has the Minister of State considered or made plans in relation to doing this? These section 254s are welcome but it is not the end result we need to facilitate the roll-out of major infrastructural projects in local authorities.