Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This process has nothing to do with that. I realise that some of these are short of infrastructure. I gave the figures for proposed projects in Dún Laoghaire yesterday. An incredible number of developers have sites ready to go and more than half of them are serviced but work on them has still not started. Will the Government act to address that? The Minister can say that he is not watering down how we do planning until the cows come home, and he is saying they can recommend this and that, but the truth is that he is reducing the decision-making powers of the planners involved. It would not stack up otherwise. The Minister said that this is a fast-tracking system. I agree that the process should be made more efficient but I do not agree with watering down the process, and regardless of how he phrases this, it amounts to some watering down of the planning process.

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