Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am going to have to bring the meeting to a close, much as we could probably keep going for a bit longer. It comes back to the point Dr. O'Leary made about demonstrating that planning is for the common good. It is what creates our societies, how we get around, where we should live, where are jobs are, and for all the good reasons we are so committed to it on this committee. In a way, maybe the judicial review discussion has done some good in that it has focused the minds of people that judicial review is not necessarily the problem. Only a very small percentage of applications are judicially reviewed and what I am hearing in this constant narrative of delays in the planning system and complaints that the system is bad is that it is down to the resources. If the board had the required number of staff, it would not have that backlog of 700 or 800 cases. That is something on which we need to be focused. Maybe that has been good in getting people to recognise we need a workforce plan, planning has a critical role in this country, we are under-resourced and we need to do something rapidly and long term about that.