Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail)
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There is a four-stage process involved. A county manager makes contact with the Department and tells it that there is a site in his or her county with sufficient space for 50 units. Mr. McCarthy will probably throw statistics at me and talk about 59-week turnarounds and so on.

In practice, there is an administrative merry-go-round that somewhat baffles me. If Developer A goes to Meath County Council and states he or she has 100 acres and wants to build a certain number of units and provides the design, the local authority's planners and various experts will either grant planning permission or not. If it is granted, the developer will build. Why, then, do we make local authorities jump through so many hoops and engaged in toing and froing with the Department and the building unit in Ballina? It goes back and up and down in this four-stage process. During a Dáil debate I brought into the Chamber what was called the streamlined version, which was ironic given how thick it was. We seem to have most of this expertise in local authorities already so why are we passing information up and down? Why does the planner in Leitrim or the architect in Meath, who have the expertise, have to be second guessed by somebody in Dublin or in the building unit? A private developer wants to go in, get planning permission and build. The lead time for assessments in the private sector is 18 months to two years but, in the public sector, it can be as bad as three to six years depending on the case. What are we doing about this? There seems to be a level of unnecessary bureaucracy, which is bound to be adding costs, never mind time and delivery delays.