Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

From the Irish Planning Institute's perspective, the board is a very respected institute that has been working and operating very well and without controversy or issue until very recently and has had some very respected members of the board and the inspectorate.

It is disheartening, as a professional planner, to see what has happened and for the public trust in that institution to ebb away in the fashion it has done. That is a function of the length of time it has taken us to identify the problems and deal with them, and of the fact the media has largely had to bang us over the head to get us to move along the way.

This proposed legislation will neither help that situation nor make it worse. I do not believe either of those possibilities is the issue. The issue is with the board and how it was being governed. It was a case of self-governance and it drifted away from its core values, which were explicit. It may have operated on the basis of convention but it operated very well up to a point, and it is only recently that it has drifted away from that level of integrity and performance that once obtained. There is a significant danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. We need to fix the problem and the OPR has, usefully, identified those problems in its report. It has put in guidance for us as to what should happen. The board should be given the opportunity to make the changes that are necessary to move forward. The issue we are talking about in the context of legislation relates to how we appoint board members and providing further transparency in that regard. Members are hearing from both sides that we are not happy with the way the proposed legislation is framed. Too much potential discretion is being given to a Minister to pick his or her team, and that is the key concern. There is also the issue of ensuring there is balance on the board.

If we fix those two key issues, will we fix the problems we currently have? As I said, if there is a bad apple in the batch, the answer will be "No". What we have to do is address some of Ms Uí Bhroin's ideas about further oversight and review, which are good ideas to ensure we look more often at the board to see whether it is doing its job. I do not think we are going to end up back here because we are all too aware of the difficulties it has created and the significant delay it has created within the development community, for example. We have a massive housing crisis and in the past week, we have not made a single decision on the board. If we wait a further week, it will have been two weeks, and that is going to have an effect on the number of houses built next year, at the most basic level. On the flip side, the environmental side, there will potentially be projects where there is unauthorised development that need regularisation in some way and that are being allowed to drift along. The current situation serves no purpose. We badly need to appoint board members and to do it in a transparent fashion.