Mr. Jack O'Sullivan:

To be honest, I do not know. Everywhere I have looked in almost every county where I have worked, and I have worked in a lot of counties on different plans, there always seems to have been a number of developments that have not gone through the system but have ended up - I will not say permitted but that they have continued without permission. The only situation I know of where an unauthorised development was permitted, and there is only one example, is in County Wicklow where a woman, I believe her name was Ms Fortune, built a small house in a fairly remote area not visible from the road. Wicklow County Council took a case against her to get the house demolished. There was a court hearing. Mr. Justice Hogan said there is a constitutional right to a house and that it was not doing any harm to anybody so he did not give Wicklow County Council the order it wanted. This caused consternation among planners because a judge effectively stated a constitutional right to a house was more important than abiding by the planning law. The judge had to come back and give another ruling that stated it only applied to that particular case and the judgment was not to be taken as a generality. This was a very rare case.

In most cases I am familiar with there is no excuse whatsoever as to why the law should not be enforced against developers who flout it and who do not seek planning permission. The only problem as I see it is the one I referred to earlier, whereby a planning authority is ill-prepared because it does not have the staff. Exactly as Deputy Clarke has said, the amount of paperwork is unbelievable. I have to wade through 300 or 400 page environmental impact assessment reports. Planners might have two or three of these on their desks. It is a tough job. I suggest one of the things that might be looked at nationally, and this might be within the purview of the committee, is whether we are staffing our local authorities with enough people. We have planners and engineers. Do we have environmental scientists on our planning authorities? I do not ask this because I am an environmental scientist. I ask because I believe they are needed. I know of only one planning authority, which is in Cork, that has a county architect. She spoke to me the other day and said she was agitating to get a landscape architect. There is a problem nationally and I believe it is more widespread than I know of personally. It would not surprise me if there were more examples of this type which are not generally hitting the headlines but only thanks to someone such as Mr. Barrett they have reached the stage of being heard before an Oireachtas committee.