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

I will make a couple of brief remarks before we get into the detail of the Bill. I thank the Minister's officials for their work throughout this process, last year and this year. They have been enormously helpful in their private and public briefings and in providing additional information. I know it continues to be a considerable amount of work for them. I wish to put on the record my thanks for their efforts. There is going to be a robust discussion of the contents of the Bill, which is as it should be, but none of that is a criticism of any of the officials or the work they have done. It is instead reflective of the views of some of us on this side to the political and policy content of the Bill. I want to make that clear at the outset.

In my 13 years in the Oireachtas as an adviser and a TD, I have never come across a Bill which started its life with such very strong support for its intentions but as its detail came to light, concerns around specific aspects of it have grown considerably. Many of the amendments that I and others have tabled are reflective of the desire of people in the planning and development community, legal professionals, environmental NGOs, etc., to get this Bill right. I welcome the fact that the Minister has said he will listen to and work with us because if we approach it in that spirit, we can fix what I believe are the many considerable problems in the Bill.

With respect to the amendments in front of us today, while some of them are of a technical nature, the transitional ones are not. I appeal to the Minister to grant us a little time when we get to group 2 because this will be the first time we will be able to put on the public record the detail of each of those amendments and we want to ensure clarity in that regard. I do not think many of the amendments will be controversial, but the more certainty and clarity there is with respect to those transitional mechanisms, the better for all of us.

With the Chair's indulgence, I ask the Minister to provide an update, if he can, on the regulations that will follow the Bill and the notional timeline for the completion of a regulatory review. The officials gave us some information in private session but many people who are watching the debate would be interested in that. Perhaps the Minister would also give an update on the hoped-for commencement timetable. There are obviously very large sections of the Bill that are concerned with the Planning and Development Act 2000, for which there were years of commencements. I would be particularly interested to hear from the Minister on that point.

Will the Minister be in a position to give us more detail on those new areas of amendments he mentioned, particularly in respect of judicial review and the governance of the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR? Perhaps he could do that at the outset. I appreciate that when we can deal with them when we see the text but the Minister, thankfully and helpfully, gave us a note on the possible changes with respect to planning appeals. We would like to have as much information as early as possible on those other areas if the Minister could provide it.