Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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Absolutely. I mistook it for another amendment. One of the really interesting discussions we had with the Irish Planning Institute was on the issue of subsidiarity and what a national policy statement should and should not be responsible for? The Irish Planning Institute made a very clear distinction between the right and the necessity of the Government setting national policy that would govern the plan-making process - the forward planning - but that once the national planning framework, the regional spatial plans and the development plans are approved and once all of that is in place, it is then the responsibility of a planning authority to grant development consents in the context of individual planning applications.

The removal of this piece of text is to make very clear where the role of central government begins and ends and where the role of local government begins and ends with respect to the function of planning statements. There was very good evidence from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council during pre-legislative scrutiny on this matter. This is one of those areas that has also been the subject of a fair amount of litigation arising from the kind of controversial applications of the Minister's predecessors’ mandatory ministerial guidelines.

In a sense, what I am trying to do with this amendment is twofold, first, to provide absolute clarity and, second, to determine what central government is responsible for and what local government is responsible for, and to make sure there is no confusion in the application and issuance of the national planning policy statements. That is important. One of the reasons the Minister and his officials, and the Attorney General and his advisers, have put so much effort into this whole range of procedures around the policy statements is they are trying to avoid confusion that leads to conflict that leads to litigation. If the Minister is not clear on where this dividing line occurs, he is opening himself up to quite a significant amount of conflict in the future. Therefore, if the Minister is setting this process up as one where the Government issues the national planning policy statements - we would prefer them to be approved by the Oireachtas but he does not agree - that then filters down into the regional spatial plans, and that then filters down into these development plans, and we have a process by which the regulator then makes sure they are all consistent, and from that point on, the local authority planning officials should then make the decisions on the development consent. That is what we are trying to do with this amendment. It is one of the very strong arguments that the Irish Planning Institute made both at the committee and in some of its subsequent submissions to us.