Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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All local authorities have population targets in their plans. Inevitably, they will not work. While they are a great idea, they just do not work in practice. Let us say a local authority has a population of 100,000. Over the lifetime of its regional and national plans, it is to grow to 110,000 but the natural increase goes beyond that without a new house being built. What happens when the local authority approaches the board? Does it examine the current population? I know that it has the latest CSO figures but I worry that if people were to implement the plans they had drawn up, they would be obliged to say the application cannot be granted because it has exceeded the permitted population figures. How does the board deal with that?