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

Can I just make a small point, please? My apologies as I had to pop out to talk to a group of students from the constituency and I was encouraging them to become planners, engineers and architects. I am very serious because they were asking me questions about climate change, renewable energy, energy security and affordable housing. Our future is secure as far as the community college is concerned.

I wish to make the point that we should stop calling the board a board. This confuses people because they think it is a board, as in a board of another organisation which has oversight. It is a planning authority. They are right in that the people who go into it as board members come out of their primary professional activity, but they are professional planning authority adjudicators, and there is a certain level of confusion around it. It is a small point but one that will actually help because if we want to restore public confidence, we should be rebranding to actually call it what it is, whatever one decides to call it, because it is a planning authority. People are on this board full time and on a very significant salary, albeit for a set period. It is a point that somebody from the board wanted to make to me; they thought that even though it sounds superficial, it is actually quite a significant part of this matter.