Mr. Conor O'Connell:

On better forward planning, an example was given of industrial and commercial lands in south County Dublin. That is a good example of forward planning in that all the infrastructure has been put in place. That is what we need for residential lands as well. There is the concept, which I think is in the national planning framework, NPF, or the regional spatial economic strategy, RSES, of city implementation boards. If we look at where the greatest population increases have taken place in Ireland in the whole, we see an increase of 258,000 people in Dublin city and county and 100,000 people in Cork city and county. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is looking at the activation and implementation of the concept of a city implementation body where Uisce Éireann, ESB Networks, the local authority, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, the National Transport Authority, NTA and all the main players in the provision of infrastructure are sitting around a table and implementing the plans. The local authority must be central to that because ultimately the local authority, through the democratic process, decides where development will take place, through the zoning process and, therefore, it must be the central focus of those implementation boards in the national planning framework. We would welcome the advancement of that concept.

On the second point about what works for large land holdings, my colleague, Hubert Fitzpatrick, will be familiar with the SDZ process.

On delays with connections, we recently conducted a survey of our members prompted by our last quarterly meeting with Uisce Éireann. We have quarterly meetings with Uisce Éireann in which we raise certain issues. In fairness, Uisce Éireann implemented the self-lay process as a result of some of these meetings. We suggested a concept whereby our members could report delays in the system, bring them to Uisce Éireann and there would be some mechanism to deal with them. They have developer connection services personnel who we liaise with but perhaps that process needs to be looked at again.