Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I have three follow-up questions. I will press the Minister of State for additional information on whether there is a timeline for the introduction of statutory timelines for the board. The answer may be "No" and that it is not possible at this stage but a sense of when the Government hopes or expects to introduce these would be helpful.

Second, my question on staffing and resources was more to do with local authorities. The Minister of State spoke of quarter 4 of 2024 for commencement of the plan-making and concept of development parts of the Bill. The real issue in terms of staffing resources concerns the local authorities. According to them, in quarter 2 of last year, they needed an additional 500 staff. They have had sanction at the planning authority level for an additional 100 and the recruitment of those is slow. To what extent is the timeline for commencement of the plan and concept of development sections of the Bill related to workforce planning with the local authorities? It is a lot of extra work for them.

Third, I forgot to mention the transitional arrangements and the process whereby the Minister may seek to turn section 28 mandatory ministerial guidelines into national planning policy statements. Has there been a discussion of what that looks like? I cannot remember off the top of my head how many mandatory ministerial guidelines have been issued since the legislation.

On that corpus of the specific planning policy requirements, SPPRs, is there a notional timeline for working through those? Some of them have been subject to significant discussion at this committee, such as rural planning, Gaeltacht planning and so on. Any information the Minister of State can give to us on the timelines for the transitional arrangements and the transposition of the SPPRs into national policy statements would be very helpful.