Mr. Philip Jones:

The committee may have got this from the local authority councillors and staff. We have three planning administrative systems, depending on which local authority a property is in. They do not talk to one another. A big IT job is needed to fix that. Dublin City Council and I believe Wexford County Council have one. Cork and one other county share another. We have three different systems and there is no interoperability between them.

I would be cautious about putting mandatory IT requirements into the Act until it is practical to implement them. Apart from the requirement I mentioned earlier about the documents of the commission not being made available to the public, there is the question of whether planning authority documents should only be made available until the decision is made and after that all that would be available is the register on which the manager's order and the planners report are visible. Why can the documents, if they are in digital form, not be made available for 12 years as it is proposed for the commission to do? The committee may wish to look at that.