Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

I can speak to that. I am showing my age but I was involved in a lot of that, as was Mr. Jones. The issue the development industry had at the time was that there was no transparency as to how money was being invoiced to them for the contribution. In Dublin city, for example, it might be a contribution of €20,000 and in Galway City Council it might be €200,000. There was an issue around how that was added up and totted up because that was not being properly done. There were quite a significant number of appeals to An Bord Pleanála at the time saying there was no way a roundabout costs €100,000 and should only cost €50,000. That was the level of debate. What has worked particularly well in terms of the section 48 contributions is that planning authorities have to look at what infrastructure they want to put in place in the next six years, how much that is going to cost, how they are going to assign that cost to development and what developments should pay what proportion of what element, based on usage. That includes residential and industrial areas, quarries, etc. That then allows them to collect that money and use it for the purposes of maintaining local roads, putting in parks or playgrounds and developing new roads.