Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 5 October 2021
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
General Scheme of the Planning and Development (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2021
Mr. Eamonn Kelly:
My apologies. There was a break in my Wi-Fi during the Deputy’s question.
This is a matter for the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. The scheme that the committee has before it is quite well developed. In all the numerous amendments from head 7 onwards, we could have simply said, "Wherever the first stage is mentioned, please delete", and it would then have been for the drafter to provide for that. We do not yet have that level of detail from the Office of the Parliamentary Council, so we put that in ourselves. Effectively, head 4 is the core, the intent of what we mean to do. In terms of more specific details, that is not for us to do. It is for the Office of the Attorney General’s drafter to produce. The key point, though, is that what is stated in the head is what we want. There is currently a section 37L that applies only to certain types of quarry. For the sake of efficiency and to make the process more understandable to the public, we want to allow it to apply to all developments, not just quarries. It is a drafting issue that we will not address but that the Attorney General will.
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