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

"The Office shall adopt a code of conduct for dealing with conflicts of interest ..." This begs one question, and I would like the Minister of State to come back on public participation and elected member consultation with the area plans and development plans.

"The Office shall adopt a code of conduct for dealing with conflicts of interest and promoting public confidence in the integrity of the conduct of its business ..." I am not at all suggesting that the Office of the Planning Regulator, as it is currently constituted, is anything other than professional. In fact, I am quite a strong defender and advocate for the office and much of the work it is doing. I sometimes have disagreements but they are policy disagreements. That relates to conflicts of interest where, for example, somebody involved in making a decision has beneficial interest or material interest in something that is related to it. The potential conflict of interest that Deputy Cian O’Callaghan highlights is, for example, a regulator made a draft direction and states that in a certain point of the plan, they believe there is a material inconsistency with a national policy statement. That planning regulator then invites submissions from a range of organisations on their view on whether or not that is a material inconsistency. That same regulator, who believes it is a material inconsistency, will then have to produce summaries of those submissions, some of which might be stating that they do not think it is materially inconsistent. That creates a potential for a conflict of interest. The issue in drafting the legislation is not if everybody is professional, everybody is doing their job to the best of their ability, and we hope that is happening all the time. We know from the controversy surrounding An Bord Pleanála two years ago that there are, unfortunately, occasions where people do not operate in that way and we have to protect against those in the legislation. Therefore, I do not think section 490(1) deals with the specific type of conflict of interest Deputy Cian O’Callaghan is talking about.