Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy is not saying that, in several of the cases to which he refers, we sent the proposal back to the local authority concerned and said that we would not accept the scale of the facility in question but that if it were substantially scaled back, it would meet the requirements of heritage. That was what happened. Some officials met those requirements after doing that and taking account of the response from the local authority through their planning system in discussions with it. My officials said that they did not like it anyway. That is not how I operate. We operate on the basis of a wider-ranging discussion in the Department on all issues. The advice to me from around the table was that the scale was the problem. It was resolved.

See this speech in context