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

I will make a final point. It is relevant to the Minister's reply.

The section 28 guidelines on building heights is a good case in point. As the Minister will be aware, what happened there is there was a desire by the Government centrally, and the Government is entitled to do this, to essentially remove building heights from development plans and section 28 mandatory ministerial guidelines were introduced. Where that came up against strongest opposition was with respect to Dublin City Council and the docklands strategic development zone. That ended up in a protracted legal dispute between Dublin City Council and An Bord Pleanála with respect to the Salesforce Tower. The courts eventually decided on the side of Dublin City Council. There was a parallel exceptionally long delay with An Bord Pleanála with Dublin City Council's own attempts to amend its own building heights to more reasonable levels. Ultimately, the delay was caused by the conflict between the section 28 guidelines and the SDZ.

Notwithstanding the fact that, for example, in this Chapter of the Bill as elsewhere, where planning policy statements are approved by the Government, there are expedited mechanisms to try to retrospectively amend various other kinds of plans, there is real potential here - I want to put this on record so that the Minister cannot say he was not alerted or warned to this - that a local authority, either on advice of the managers, which was the case with the docklands and Dublin City Council, or because of the majority view of the members, rejects and refuses to approve the expedite measure and you would get into a protracted legal battle between a local authority and the OPR and the Minister, or the Department, over some of this issue, whereas if there was a mechanism for trying to screen through some of that and negotiate it and navigate it through an Oireachtas committee procedure, it would save you time. The fundamental flaw here is, rather than learn the lessons of a poorly designed section 28 ministerial guideline process, the Minister is trying to fix those by strengthening the centralisation of decision-making but he has not in any way removed the potential for conflict or litigation. If we had had a form of committee scrutiny on the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy's building height guidelines, if we had had, for example, the Dublin City Council planning department in to discuss, it would have alerted us to the problems that subsequently spent a year and a half or two years in the courts and delayed all sorts of residential development. The Minister will not change his position but I want to put on record that I think he is making a mistake. This will lead to greater delays, not fewer.

My final question is, how many section 28 guidelines are there currently on the books? We asked that previously.