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

Yes. One of the issues that has arisen is the very significant increase in judicial reviews of decisions by the board with respect to SHDs. A large number of those judicial reviews have been won. In 90% of the cases that were won, the developer materially contravened the city or county development plan and the board approved that permission. The cause of that conflict was not so much the SHD, but the mandatory ministerial or section 28 guidelines, in respect of building heights and inferior design standards for rental apartments and, to a more recent extent, the misapplication of the planning objectives contained in the national planning framework, which are very high level, overarching planning objectives that, in a number of instances, have been used to make a decision by the board in direct contravention of new county development plans, which, in some cases, have the approval of the Planning Regulator.

The issue is that material contraventions should only be in exceptional circumstances. More important, now that we have a new round of city and county development plans that have gone through the process with the Planning Regulator, the number of potential conflicts should be far lower than arose in the previous period. My amendment is very specific. It states that an application should not be accepted unless the applicant demonstrates what exceptional circumstances warrant its consideration and, to ensure that process is done in a legislatively appropriate way, I am giving the Minister of the day powers to set the regulations that would determine that. Everybody here has had cases where the controversy at the centre of a development has been the breach of a development plan. If the development should only be breached in exceptional circumstances, surely there should be a filter and, therefore, I see no reason an amendment either in the form of the wording I have provided, or some other version of it brought forward on Report Stage, could not be considered.