Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

First, I welcome our guests here today. I will comment, in the first instance, on the very professional way they have laid out their presentations to us. This is very much a newer angle, is about the nuts and bolts, and the administration of the systems, which I believe is important, because we have not had a great deal of focus on these two particular areas. Our witnesses come with great expertise in these areas and that has to be acknowledged.

I want to spend my few minutes here discussing the IT and digital possibilities in planning because I believe that that is the way forward. We have to be conscious that we will be in a period of transition and that there is an older generation, so it is also about accessibility to our planning process. It is about encouraging the public participation and access to the files. I happen to live in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and have been a councillor which involves a very high level engagement with our planning processes. It is certainly up at a very high level in respect of engagement with appeals and with An Bord Pleanála, because there is a great number of protected structures there.

If we just take protected structures as an example, the applicant will usually put five to seven sets of these very large boxes in to the local authority. One is referred to the prescribed bodies, such as An Taisce, or the Irish Georgian Society, which is not a prescribed body. An Taisce is an example of one such body. When all of this information then is finally distilled and determined; there is no obligation on the planning authority to keep these reports. They do not keep them. The Irish Architectural Archive, which is on the other end of Merrion Square here, seeks and tries to get these if it can, because they have a very valuable resource, but that is done on a voluntary basis.

These are organisations which bring those applications, subject to the approval of the applicant, to be archived because these conservation architectural appraisals, assessments and inventories are critical to cataloguing these protected structures. What is the potential for spatial data, which Mr. McLaren touched upon, and GIS, mapping? We have an Historic and Archaeological Heritage Bill going through the Houses at the moment, and again, there is talk about tracking the data and the archaeology and to have that imprinted onto the county development plan maps. There is a view that we should have a layering system because we do not want to totally congest our county development plan maps between all of the different designations and different things. I ask each delegation to touch on IT planning, its possibilities and opportunities, and how they believe we can in some practical way include and make provision in this legislation to embrace all of that.