Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Again, I thank everyone for their contributions today. I will make a couple of comments and then ask a general question to everyone. Much of our discussion is centred around urban residential development but actually the issues at hand are as pertinent to all kinds of development. We have had folks in on precisely those environmental issues like hedgerows and biodiversity but we have also had discussions around wind farms, onshore and offshore, and quarries, etc. In some sense, the process is the process. If the process is designed well, you get less conflict and better outcomes. If it is designed badly, it does not matter if it is an urban or rural setting, it causes difficulties.

I would just remove the word objections from our vocabulary. In all of my experience in two different jurisdictions, the overwhelming majority of those who engage with the planning process want to change something. There is always a small minority who do not want anything anywhere but the majority of submissions I have read and the small number I have submitted are about improving a development, amending it or changing it and therefore they are observations and proposals for improvement, whether one agrees or not as opposed to people saying, “Nothing here whatever.” That is important to stress.

One thing that many people have been saying, and it is coming out in this discussion today, is that if you have got problems downstream, you need to try to find where in the stream the problems originate and then fix them as far upstream as possible. That goes to public consultation and public participation. But the really important thing is that you can only participate if you understand the rules of the game. Going back to Mr. Heneghan’s point, most sitting county councillors have exactly the same frustration with the development plan process, particularly when they have done the first one. Senator Boyhan’s experience is having done three and he understands it better. When we went through our most recent development plan – and obviously my role was as a TD so it is not a statutory one – it was the most restrictive development plan process ever. It was not because the officials in the council wanted to restrict it but because the changes that have been made at state-wide Government policy have made it increasingly difficult even for managers, let alone elected members, to have much flexibility. That is part of the difficulty with it. That leads to the question I have: if we are all saying we want more participation whether it is in preplanning applications, local area plans, development plans or central government policy and we are all saying it is really hard to engage in the process because it is technical, technocratic and it feels obstructive, what could we usefully recommend in our prelegislative scrutiny report to the Minister to help everybody get involved as early, or as upstream, as possible to fix those problems?

I ask Mr. Henaghan and Ms Foster how it would be easier for them and for their members to participate? What could the State do or the legislation recommend to facilitate that? That is my first question.

The second is that beyond just naming things like preplanning, I ask that they go into as much detail in the time that we have because a couple of good recommendations in our report from this discussion could be very helpful. The more we can get our witnesses involved upstream, the less we will be talking about judicial reviews, legal challenges or whatever, and the more we will be talking about good quality plan-led development, whether it is urban or rural.