Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party)
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I want to make a point on the monitoring. I agree that it needs to be monitored constantly. We do not want to go too far off track before we realise we have done so and then try to pull it back in or work out why it went that way. We are pointing out some reasons we think it is going that way. The regional assemblies were to be reported to every two years but there was an attempt to push this out to every four years. This is the ideal avenue for monitoring. The regional assemblies are made up of councillors who represent the areas and they have very competent planning teams. I believe the reports are now going to be made every three years. When we were discussing the planning Bill I argued that we need to monitor and watch this consistently. We had a gap of ten years when nothing happened. The national spatial strategy either never took off or took off in the wrong direction completely.