Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the question. The first thing to acknowledge is that when we are talking about building homes that will stand for 60 or 70 years to house many generations of families, we have to get it right. In the past, certain planning schemes did not get it right. What we did in the Department was work with the chief executives of the local authorities to streamline what was an eight or nine-stage process down to the current four-stage process, which is 59 weeks and is comparable to the private sector when we are talking about large-scale development of housing on large sites and the different work that needs to be done as part of that timeline.

One of the areas I looked to try to cut down the time on was procurement. We cannot step around European Union procurement law. There is a one-stage process local authorities can go through. It is a much quicker process. Approximately 100 projects that have come to the Department through the four-stage process could have gone through the one-stage process but the local authorities did not submit them under the one-stage process.

See this speech in context