Mr. John Sheahan:

To come more into line with the timeframes at national level, the ten-year timeframe might be the ideal. With anything shorter than that, we would run into commencing the review after five or six years, given it takes a year to get into and a year to get out of, which is a long time.

The Deputy asked how we found the new way of doing business remotely. Personally, I found it to be a disaster because we did not have our colleagues in one room. If we wanted a breakout meeting in respect of any aspect of the plan, we could not get our colleagues together. This was on a cross-party basis, and I am not talking about individual parties or anything like that. Believe it or not, councillors work together in these situations to get the job done and all parties, bar none, get involved.

We recently produced the first-ever Limerick city and county development plan and it was rolled over for eight or nine years since the previous plan because of the amalgamation and so on. Everything did not fall apart just because there was not a city and county development plan immediately after the amalgamation, and now it is far more cohesive. We are going through the teeth of it to see where any hiccups are because we already have a material contravention on substandard roads, within less than 12 months of passing the plan. Much of it was carried out online and I found that difficult because we need our colleagues with us in the room to discuss the issues.

I urge whoever in a ministerial capacity might be listening to this meeting to consider a review of that legislation. Members might recall that legislation was brought in as a kneejerk reaction to Covid and it contained no sunset clause. It needs to be tweaked to ensure a higher percentage of attendance at councillor meetings overall, but especially in the case of the likes of budgets and development plans. That has been my experience of it.