Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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I advise members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity, by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative they comply with any such direction.

The minutes from the previous meeting have been circulated. Are they agreed? Agreed.

Members will recall that we issued a direction last week to any bodies or groups that had previously appeared before the committee. We noted those that had not returned their further promised information were required to send forward the information for consideration by today or else they would appear here in public on 9 July to detail the reason for the delay. As of today, we have received further information from all bodies, including the Department of public expenditure, Uisce Éireann, the Department of Transport, Transport Infrastructure Ireland and the National Transport Authority. I make the observation that most of it came in the past 24 hours. Some members might only have seen some of it this morning. As a matter of form, anybody who does not send information requested by the committee at a public meeting of the Oireachtas within 14 days will appear the following week to explain why, so I hope the message had an effect.

I will deal with a few items of correspondence. No. 0027 is an email from the Western Development Commission and concerns a submission to the consultation on the national development plan. The submission focuses on investment in infrastructure in the western region, which is noted and published data. It is not directly to us but is a copy.

No. 0028 is correspondence sent on behalf of Sweetbriar Residents Association, Tramore, regarding ongoing water supply issues, which is related to an issue that has been going on for a while. It raises some issues with Uisce Éireann, such as ageing infrastructure, underfunding, governance and oversight weaknesses.

I propose that we agree to forward the correspondence to Uisce Éireann for a direct reply to us and then we will send it to the person who contacted us. We are not getting directly involved in the issue. We will just ask for a reply and forward it.

The next matter is the committee report, which we said we would launch before the break. We indicated at the previous meeting that we hoped and planned to launch the report on 10 July. In light of the large volume of information we received in the last 24 hours, and in fairness to the Departments in question, we will need to consider that information, some of which will be incorporated in our report. For this reason, I propose a revised schedule. We will still go ahead with the report, but the timing will have to change because of the late arrival of the information. I suggest we have a draft report at next week's meeting, on 9 July. Members who have amendments - a note on this will be circulated - should then send them in by 3 p.m. on the following Monday, 14 July. That means they will be able to submit amendments from Wednesday evening onwards. We will then meet on Tuesday, 15 July, to finalise the report. Tuesday is not the normal day for meeting but we will get an hour somewhere in the committee rooms on Tuesday evening to finalise the report, which I propose we launch on Wednesday, 16 July, the day before the Dáil adjourns. As that is the day on which our committee usually meets, we will not have a committee meeting that day if we are launching the report. The right thing to do is to move the launch back to the last week of the session, rather than the week that, so as to allow us time to consider all the information we have just received. That is a fair and reasonable approach. Is that timeline agreed? Agreed. We will launch the report on Wednesday, 16 July, in the audiovisual room. I will ask the secretariat to arrange that. It will be a public launch of the report, which will cover the work to date.

We will suspend briefly to allow the witnesses from An Coimisiún Pleanála and the Office of the Planning Regulator to take their seats.