Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to go back to Ms Foster and Mr. Heneghan first but then to Mr. Mandal and Ms Cadell. At the very heart of their conversation, the witnesses have been talking today about the voice of the members - I presume that is the members of the council - the voice of the citizen, and subsidiarity. What is a city and county development plan but a contract with the people. It sets out a sense of certainly about how one's community, county or city is going to progress in terms of proper planning and sustainable development.

I keep going back to one issue. I find the idea of serial objectors offensive. Clearly, if the planning system is robust enough, it should screen out anything that does not relate to proper planning and sustainable development. It does not matter who the objectors are. If they are coming from County Mayo or from anywhere else, people have a right. We live in a community, a culture and an environment and people should have the right to articulate their views about the proper planning and sustainable development in any part of Ireland, quite frankly. As someone who has been involved in such cases, and has been to the High Court in respect planning, and made many objections and been successful, despite being called a serial objector or a pain in the arse - excuse the French - it is important we allow citizens to engage. We live in beautiful parts of this country and we should be entitled to defend those communities. We should be able to mobilise. We have the right to meet and to organise in a structured way. We have constitutional rights anyway around engagement and we should not be frustrated by the Legislature.

That is my view and I fully support that. I do not believe there is such a thing as serial objectors. There may be people who continuously object but they should be weeded out through a proper, robust planning system. The planning system, initially through the local authority or the planning authority, should clearly screen these out and give reasons why it either refuses permission, amends an application or grants full permission or permission with conditions. When it goes to the board it should do likewise. Sometimes the problem with decisions is that we do not get that sort of granular detail of explanation which I think we should all have. On either side of the debate, everyone should have that.

As someone who was a councillor for many years and had three county development plans through my hands, I am conscious of the importance of engagement with citizens. I live out in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown and I know Dublin City and most of the Dublin local authorities would have huge engagement with their country development plan process. Our guests would work very closely with city and county councillors themselves. Will they share their take on what public representatives at local level are saying about the Bill? On the one hand, local authorities are connected with political parties here and none but I get a sense they are exceptionally disappointed across all parties. They talk about not having the party do anything about it. But our guests engage with them and they rightly talk about how they interact with them.

Will Ms Foster say, for instance, how she sees it and what her experience is and what she is hearing from her local councils on this legislation?