Victor Boyhan (Independent)
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I thank the witnesses. As someone who has been involved in the planning process, it is one of the many things that politicised me. I was exceptionally active in the area. I am reminded of the very successful Central Body for Residents Associations, ACRA. They mobilised. I think it is time for another mobilisation of the citizens in planning. The local elections are next year. I actively encourage and unashamedly tell citizens to engage in the planning process. I ask the witnesses to do likewise and consider their contacts in their residents' associations. I am doing that because I believe the political system in many ways has failed the citizens. I am a citizen and the witnesses are citizens. We are all citizens. This is a real opportunity. I believe in political leverage. We need to shake the very foundations of our local government structures. Really good people have come into local government because they have lived the life of a citizen, they know what affects them in terms of libraries, community facilities, planning, property tax and all those issues. I am not suggesting that I am against property tax, but it should be spent properly and retained fully. That is another debate for another day. It is a good time for our citizens to look at how planning, proper planning and sustainable development are being dealt with in their communities. Let us mobilise, put it to our citizens what they think and take the political journey. I will crank that up in the next few weeks and months.

Ms Kimber made a good point, perhaps one of the best I have heard in all of our deliberations, about dispute resolution. Be it a private person, a community group, a registered company or whatever, nobody wants to engage in or risk losing a load of money on litigation. It is a very expensive process. I would like to tease that out more. Perhaps not today, but perhaps Ms Kimber could send the committee some of the issues. I would like the committee to examine the model across the European Union and outside to see how it works. It is an important point. Nobody wants to stop proper, sustainable development. We have an economy, jobs, job creation and many other things to do. We have to build houses. We want to build houses, sustain our communities and address rural housing; that is not for our witnesses today. We need to address that and revitalise our rural communities, some of which are now on the fringes of Dublin. Housing along transport corridors needs to be enhanced and we must examine how we can link them to the cities and nodes. We should examine how we can decentralise. Then there is IT. We can embrace all of that. I also note what Ms Foster said about IT and online. I am familiar with the difficulties of that. I recently had people from Dublin City Council tell me they could not view conservation reports for protected structures because they had no coloured scanners. Citizens wanted to engage but they could not. We must be careful when talking about IT. I am a great supporter of IT in planning but we also must be conscious of other people. We need to assist people in our one-stop-shops in planning offices.

This committee will have to write a report, at the end of which we will have to include recommendations. I ask each of the witnesses, if they were to choose one recommendation or one thing missing from the Bill, what would that be? I ask them to do so in a sentence or two, perhaps starting with Ms Kimber.