Mr. Brendan Heneghan:

Perhaps I could address the Senator's point about the residents having a meeting of the residents' association. The timescales are completely impractical for doing that. We have made the point that frequently the planning authority will not even let us see the documents until two weeks before the submission date. The other practical problem about having public meetings is if there is a controversial development, and I, as the residents' association planning person, take it upon myself to organise a meeting, there is an amount of brickbats coming through the air at me for having decided that. Some of these meetings can be incredibly hostile. It is not really a practical idea but it is mainly a timeline problem. We only have four weeks on the initial submission, which is not enough time to do the logistics of a meeting. We do not know, until the planning authorities have made a decision, if we must do an appeal and then there would be four weeks. Perhaps the committee would be happy to look at the practicality of a ten-week timescale on submissions. I do not believe that some of those meetings have been practical in the timelines we had. Ms Foster may be better placed to talk about the stress of the judicial review process.