Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I suggest that the Minister of State's Government is not supporting her in her desire to do so. How are members of the public to place their faith in an internal inquiry into local authorities controlled by the Government parties? One cannot but think that the Government, which had declared that the matters involved were "spurious mostly", as the Minister, Deputy Hogan, said, had already come to a decision before the reviews were launched. Furthermore, the Government has conducted another internal review on top of the previous internal reviews which had been ordered by the former Minister, John Gormley. There are reviews on top of reviews. Why not go with the process set out by the previous Government? I do not think there is anyone in this House or outside who has anything but the height of respect for the integrity of John Gormley and his party with regard to this issue. For that reason I would have thought that there was a file or a series of files in place to allow the Minister of State to take the high moral ground, if that is what she wished to do. It would certainly have levelled the concerns and would have dealt with the perception to which I referred.

It was on the back of these internal reviews of the problems in the planning system that the Minister felt it was necessary for an independent review staffed by external experts to identify the systematic problems and put forward recommendations. What was different about this internal review from the ones that had been completed in 2010? Why did the then Minister feel that their findings were serious enough to merit an external review while this review did not?

Another lie peddled by the Government is that the previous Government had done nothing to progress the creation of an independent planning inquiry. This view has been coming from backbenchers in an effort to support the position of the Minister, Deputy Hogan. In my view, in today's report the Government misleadingly states that the panel was not formally established. On "Prime Time" last March, the Minister of State, Deputy Alan Kelly, stated that then Minister, John Gormley, had done nothing to progress the external reviews. In reality, the Government had made significant progress in setting up the panel of independent external experts to probe the planning complaints. By January 2011, a panel of experts had undertaken a thorough tendering process and the Department had written to six planning experts to notify them of their appointment.

See this speech in context