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

I think the Chairman does himself a disservice because the amendment is sensible, well crafted and is sufficiently open to allow the Government to decide what “respond to” would actually mean. I do not think the immediate implication of inserting this would be a requirement for an individual response to be posted to everybody. The way in which primary legislation works is it sets out the broad principle and it is up to the Government, through regulation, to decide. I think the Chairman’s amendment is a good one.

Second, it is not the case that this is already done. For those of us who went through the last national planning framework, as the Minister of State and I both did, there were response documents but those documents did not even have single-sentence responses to submissions. The Chair rightly makes a comparison with the development process. As the Minister of State knows, the city or county manager provides a report to his or her members which gives short summary responses to what are often long and complex submissions. That has two values. First, in this case, those in government who are considering the NPF get that written response. They are not giving the Oireachtas its full and proper role in the NPF process but we will have an argument about that in a few minutes.

Second, to emphasise Deputy O'Callaghan’s point, we are asking people to engage in a public consultation. When individuals, community-based organisations, professional groups and private sector interests go to the effort of making submissions, and those submissions are not taken on board, people have a rightful expectation to understand why that has happened. If people make submissions that just disappear down a black hole of Civil Service work, that will disincentivise them to engage in the future whereas at least now they will get some sense of why something was not taken on board.

I appreciate that would be a huge undertaking for the national planning framework because it is much bigger than a development plan. However, it only happens every ten years. Therefore, on the grounds the Chairman and Deputy O’Callaghan outlined, there has to be a way to find some mechanism. The response documents mentioned are general and high level in nature.