Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Amendment No. 236 seeks to provide that an application to the board for permission for development should be made available on the website of the board within two working days of receipt and that any documents related to the application, correspondence and submissions should be made available online not later than three days after they are received or sent by the board.

It is the intention that applicants will prepare a dedicated website for applications under this chapter in the same manner as is currently the case for strategic infrastructure development applications.

This system works very well, and the board publishes links to these websites on its own website as a matter of course. These provisions are repeated here for maritime applications in section 287(2)(c), so the requirement to publish the application documentation online is already in place.

This amendment is also unnecessary and would repeat obligations already placed on the board under section 146 of the Planning and Development Act. The amendment to the Act proposed at Schedule 12 in respect of section 125 provides that the obligations of the board to publish material on its website will be applied to maritime applications. I will propose a further technical amendment to this section later to ensure its applicability to both applications under sections 291 and 297.

The formulation the Deputies propose would deviate significantly from the existing land-based provisions and could result in a situation in which one type of application has a different set of publishing requirements from another simply by virtue of the fact that a part of it is in the maritime area.

I oppose the amendment. Ultimately, I feel it is not necessary on foot of the aforementioned.