Mr. Niall Gleeson:

The example I gave is that we have just delivered a wastewater treatment plant in Arklow. It is state of the art. There is a population of 35,000 in Arklow. That project received planning permission in 2019 following a public consultation process and after years of trying to get the right site. Eventually, we did agree on a site. We got planning permission through An Bord Pleanála. There was no challenge. We built and delivered that in the past five years. In the same year, we got planning permission for the greater Dublin drainage project but that was challenged in the courts. The matter has gone from the courts back to An Bord Pleanála. We had to go back to MARA to supply additional information. With the judicial review, there were, I think, 18 challenges. Only one was upheld. It was a communications issue between An Bord Pleanála and the EPA - it was nothing we could have influenced – but that has held us up by six years. My challenge is the randomness of that in the context of one project getting through while another does not. We need to take the randomness out of the planning system and the consent system in order that we will know that it will take four or five years to get planning permission. If we knew that, we could plan and organise much better. That does not only apply to the public sector bodies; it also applies to the private sector. We really need to get certainty around the planning and consent processes.