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

In my view, this is probably the weakest section of the Bill. I want to spend a little bit of time going through why in support of the amendments. A small section of amendment No. 49 is missing. It is probably my fault at the submitting end rather than the Bills Office. I might come back to it on Report Stage.

The original legislation Eoghan Murphy amended during the lifetime of the previous Government set the expiration date for the strategic housing development as December this year. It was something that was going to happen irrespective of who was in government. The current Government made a bad decision in accepting that the pause to the planning process in 2020 required a two-year extension. The Government did so and it created a reasonable expectation among applicants that the strategic housing development process would come to an end in February. Pretty much everybody understood that to be the case. This is not what is in this transitional mechanism.

There are two transitional mechanisms. It is important people fully understand their import. The first is for those people who have already been in the pre-planning strategic housing development process for some time and who receive pre-planning approval to move to the formal strategic housing development application process by the end of December. They are allowed move to full application. This is a reasonable expectation because they expected to have until February to make a planning application. What I do not understand with respect to this group of people is why the Minister is giving 16 weeks when for a year and a half we have all been told February would be the end date for strategic housing development applications. Therefore, an eight-week period rather than a 16-week period would have been reasonable and legally sound. It would have meant strategic housing development applications for this category of applicants would be made in and around August. It is one of the things we would have had to live with.

My first amendment proposes shortening the period for the formal application to the board for a strategic housing development for someone who already has pre-planning approval.

The second category of transitionary arrangements the Minister made is excessive in the extreme. It allows an applicant to put in a pre-planning application to the board for an SHD by 16 December, if 17 December is the enactment date, and the board will have nine weeks to make a decision, which takes us up to February. It will then have 16 weeks to make the application, which takes us up to June, and there will be a further 16 weeks for the board to make its decision, which takes us up to October. Conceivably, therefore, SHD applications could be submitted in the middle of next year, with decisions made in the autumn of next year, and some of them potentially judicially reviewed and having legal challenges running into 2023. I do not understand why that mechanism has been put in place.

The full wording of the amendment, which should be in front of us today, although I will return to it on Report Stage, would not just have shortened the eight-week period but would have meant that in the case of anybody who only applies for pre-planning SHD approval at this point, the board would make that pre-planning assessment. Instead of allowing the application to go into SHD next year, if the board gave approval, it would go into the LSRD process. That would be much more sensible and it would do exactly what Deputy O'Callaghan is trying to do, namely, dramatically reduce the potential for controversial and unviable SHD applications to be made throughout next year. I find it difficult to understand why we would be so generous.

I think the Minister is guilty here of making the same mistake he made with co-living, which was giving applicants too long a period from the announcement of a review, to the receipt of the report, to the announcement of the action, to the enactment of the action. It is the same here. People are getting an additional year for SHDs when they should have ended in February. While I can live with a transition arrangement that takes us up to April for those people who have got pre-application approval, I cannot live with somebody just lobbing in a pre-planning application later this month and then getting a six-month grace period to make a full application, with a decision to be made in October. There is no logic to that and I do not think it is necessary, which is why I will certainly press my amendments and why I also support the spirit of the amendments tabled by Deputies O'Callaghan and Boyd Barrett.