Mr. John Sheahan:

I have and to be quite candid and honest with the Senator, the view is that obviously there is something in the rural planning guidelines that nobody wants to publish and they are afraid to grasp that nettle. At least if we threw it out, it would let us debate it, even if there is something distasteful in the guidelines.

Nobody has a definitive definition of what "rural" is. When Project 2030 started out, rural was anything under a population of 10,000. In the CSO figures, rural is any population of 1,500 people or fewer. What is meant by rural and what is meant by supporting rural planning and rural guidelines? The director, Mr. David Kelly, and Councillor Terry Shannon will bear me out. It was a big bugbear in our regional spatial and economic strategy, RSES, document because the good people of the Oireachtas, when they passed Project 2024, stated that you had to have an economic and social need to have a house in rural Ireland and when we questioned people on it, they had not read that page. Each of our RSES documents has robust rural planning policy within the regional policy objectives, RPOs, within them now. That has come from the bottom up from councillors against what came from the top down. I would urge that they - and I will urge my own party Ministers and colleagues too - throw it out there because somebody has some document somewhere. Is it a case that we do not want to throw it out for debate? Let them throw it out and we will help to arrive at a solution on it.