Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I hope that the Minister will respond. During pre-legislative scrutiny when we had briefings with the Department, one of the consistent messages coming through was that there was a wish to ensure consistency between development plans and what were then the ministerial guidelines or SPPRs. As Deputy Ó Broin said, there has been a lot of litigation, conflict and judicial reviews around the issue of planning applications and consistency with development plans versus consistency with ministerial guidelines or the SPPRs. My understanding was that a key objective of the Minister on this was to remove those inconsistencies and conflicts and ensure that the national planning statements would inform the development plans and that when it comes to the decision-making process by planners and the assessment of applications, they would be informed by the development plans which would be consistent with the national planning statements. What I am taking from what the Minister is saying now is that while the national planning statements will inform the development plans, which will inform the assessment of planning applications and decision-making by planners, they will also directly inform not just the development plans but the assessment of planning applications by planners. They will not simply inform the forward plan making and, therefore, they do stray into the assessment of planning applications and the decision-making process rather than just being confined to forward planning.