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

I am clear about that but what the Minister has said does not make sense. On the one hand, he is saying that this is to provide guidance when planners are making their assessment prior to their decision. He is saying it does not reach into their role but that he wants consistency and wants to remove inconsistencies. Part of the problem with planning consents is that we can have a high-level ministerial statement about a particular issue but how that is then applied in very specific urban and rural locations requires a degree of flexibility to get good planning. The only way we can get the consistency that the Minister is talking about is by restricting the ability of individual planners to interpret the plans upon which they have to assess all planning applications. If I am a planner in a local authority and I am making an assessment, I have to consider if there is an LAP, a development plan, regional plans and the current SPPRs. There are always going to be variances. The issue is not that there are inconsistencies but that there are individual decisions about the individual application of a complex set of rules to site-specific planning applications. On the one hand the Minister is saying that he is not interfering with the decision making but on the other hand he wants to remove inconsistencies and have consistency. That sounds to me like he is seeking to constrain the scope and range of flexibility and that is precisely the point that the Irish Planning Institute is warning against. The Minister is trying to have it both ways with his response.