Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is an angle to this. Like Deputies O'Callaghan and Ó Broin, I have experienced this in the context of assisting people making observations on a planning application, and for myself. There is no doubt there are significant delays and that the scanning can be of poor quality. In essence, we are getting an electronic system outputting a printed format. We are then scanning the printed format and bringing it back into an electronic system. I have had some comments on it from the development side. They are saying this is unnecessary from their perspective. They feel there are additional costs for them in terms of providing large format hard copies and so on. I do not agree with all of that because there obviously have to be hard copies available. However, it seems strange that these documents exist in an electronic format, which is where they are created, and we put them through two paper formats and a scanning process before putting them back into an electronic format. It does not make good sense. E-planning is probably the solution and it might be helpful if there were more detail on that on Report Stage. I have some sympathy with the members. Both the people putting forward the observations and the developments find this archaic.