Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his response, in which he touched on several things. Much of our planning system is good. It comes in for a great deal of criticism, but there is a lot to our planning system that is good. One of the extremely good aspects is that it is very participative at all stages, from the people we elect to adopt and craft our plans at every level to the ability for anybody to submit a submission, an observation or an appeal or to make use of the other mechanisms available to us. This has always been one of the good parts of our planning system. It does create problems and conflict, but it is good because the more people we get involved, the better. Not everybody comes out with a result they are happy with, but at least they have been able to be involved in the process.

I accept the national planning framework goes through a certain number of stages where there is stakeholder involvement and consultation and it is possible to make submissions. I refer to one of the weaknesses of the national plan. A Government should be proud to stand over its national plan and offer it up for debate. My proposed amendment is not intended to offer up the national planning framework for debate and amendments as we would with a Bill. The objective is to allow us to debate where we want to go as a country in terms of how we achieve a regional balance, our challenging climate objectives and a low-carbon future that builds for the population of 6 million people we are looking at reaching in the timeframe of this national planning framework. I ask that the Minister of State bring this back and consider if this is a weakness in our system, notwithstanding that there is all that other input into it before the Government publishes this document.

It is when the document is published that I am talking about. When the Government has made its decision, taken account of all of that input and published it, we really should have a debate in the Oireachtas. It could turn into four hours of debate on one-off rural housing, and I would not be surprised if it did, but we should give people the opportunity to debate a national plan that has such far-reaching implications. The national development plan involves very large infrastructural spend and it follows the national planning framework, so there are other implications to being able to have that debate. I ask the Minister of State to consider whether the passing of it by resolution gives us the opportunity to have a couple of hours of debate on such a far-reaching and important document.