Mr. Gerard Brady:

We have elected representatives, and processes in the planning system that are decided by those elected representatives, when we talk about local development plans, for example. There is a lot of public input into these plans and we are saying that there needs to be more engagement earlier. What we have seen is that, compared to a lot of the rest of Europe, the Irish system has a more constrained input in the early stage and then a very judicial system down the road. A person has to go to the courts if he or she objects to something down the road. We are saying that we need more focus at the start when there is more input from everyone in local communities and local businesses. That then goes through the same system of developing a local development plan. At least it can be said further down the road that there is a more defined set of objective facts about what local communities think the public good is for their community. To avoid going into the courts and getting dragged through them for years, we should engage with communities much earlier and much better than what we are doing at the moment. The planning legislation gives us this opportunity because there are longer local development plan timelines, which means we have more space to do that than we did under the previous regime.