Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have given some consideration to the amendment. I will not support it. I echo Deputy Casey's view on it. This six-page amendment is half the length of the Bill that we are discussing in the first instance and is not pertinent to it. I will repeat what I said on Committee Stage and last night. We need Ministers to stop using this mechanism of tabling Report Stage amendments - at times very detailed and technical ones - that have nothing to do with the Bill. This is not a criticism of any of the officials or the Minister of State, as this is not necessarily his fault, but it is bad practice. Our committee has been very flexible with the Department and the Ministers, but that will not necessarily always be the case.

I am opposing the amendment for the same reason I opposed the final piece of legislation on the Planning Regulator. It was then Judge Mahon's central recommendation, which was critical of the overcentralisation of power in the Minister as regards local government and planning, that that power be devolved to fully independent bodies such as a planning regulator. My central objection is not that the Minister should not have oversight of local authorities. I fully accept that there should be oversight, but there should be independence. It should not be the case that a regulator undertakes an investigation or report and recommends a course of action to the Minister and he or she can then ignore it if he or she so wishes. If the Minister chooses to ignore it, all he or she has to do is lay before the Oireachtas the reasons for same. That is not what an independent planning regulator should do, nor is it what Judge Mahon recommended. My principal objection does not relate to oversight but to the Minister's power to decide whether the recommendations from the Planning Regulator are acted upon, which is contrary to the letter and spirit of the Mahon tribunal's key recommendation on planning. Therefore, I will not support the amendment.

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