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

We can do that later. I want to go back to section 22 and the Minister's planning statement. A number of years ago, a judicial review of a residential development was pretty much unheard of. The small number of judicial reviews that took place on an annual basis were mainly about strategic infrastructure developments or large commercial units. There is a mistaken perception that the cause of the very significant increase in judicial reviews of large-scale residential developments was the SHD process. The SHD process facilitated it, but it is not actually the nub of the problem.

The nub of the problem with residential developments was a clash between the content of development plans and the content of the special planning policy requirements in the ministerial guideline or the national planning framework. Even though, thankfully, the SHD process is gone, the potential for that conflict is still very significant, perhaps more so in regard to the very general SPPRs in the national planning framework. I am putting that forward as context for my questions.

Section 22 of the Bill gives the Minister the power, with the agreement of Government, to issue planning statements. They are equivalent to the mandatory ministerial guidelines or the SPPRs. As I read the Bill, there is no role whatsoever for the Oireachtas in that process. It is a function of Government and the Minister. There is no public participation in that. The Minister may choose to do that, as his predecessors did, but it is not a requirement.

If that planning policy statement creates a new conflict with existing city or county development plans, section 62 makes provision for an expedited amendment to the development plan with no consent required of elected members, in real terms, and-or section 122C allows for the planning authority and, one would assume, the board, to allow for a material contravention where the new planning policy statement was in conflict with development planning.

In some senses, this seems to be retrospectively looking back at the SPPRs and mandatory ministerial guidelines and asking if they had been better designed the last time whether the rush of judicial reviews would have been stopped. I am not asking the witnesses to confirm or deny that interpretation; it is a political interpretation. Am I correct in saying that section 22 has no role for the Oireachtas or public participation?

Sections 62 and 122C allow for a fast-track amendment of the development plan to bring it into line and-or planning consent to be granted as a material contravention. It basically asserts the hierarchy of the ministerial statement, something which the courts disagreed with with respect to many of the residential DRs There is nothing factually incorrect in how I presented it.