Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

My amendment No. 768 is very similar in its rationale to Deputy Matthews's one. This is a very real issue. Let us say a Part 8 application is put forward that goes out to public consultation. Members of the public make their submissions and on the basis of those, very substantial changes, or what might be deemed substantial or material changes, are made. That can be then agreed and the development can go ahead, even though members of the public have made their submissions based on a completely different thing, namely, the original application. As such, the public has no say over the amended Part 8 application. That is very unfair. To give one recent example from my area, residents of a whole row of cottages have lost the right to park outside their homes because of a Part 8 application that was amended. Now they have no parking outside their houses and they are raging. That is an example because it is a substantial change by any definition, whatever one might think about the rights and wrongs of it, and it was a very divisive issue at the time. The point is that if members of the public, in good faith, make public submissions on one proposal and then the thing that is agreed - especially if it is going to impact fairly substantially on them, the environment or whatever - is completely different from the thing they made submissions on, that is really not fair.