Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am anxious to allow the Minister to continue, because he was going in a certain direction. He said something important that I had not taken into account. While the amendment is very important for all of the reasons we discussed earlier, if it were to be accepted, I imagine the Bill would have to go back to the Seanad, which may stretch out the Bill and cause us to miss the timeline. As much as I want to make sure we have pre-planning consultation, I want to see an end to the SHD process. Therefore, we cannot miss our timeline. I had not given consideration to that point. I hear the Minister's point that the current arrangements allow for it, but I would like to see that fleshed out more at regulation level.

Deputy Pringle is right in the point he makes about a community group being known, but the difficulty is that this relies on local officials making an arbitrary decision. We know that arbitrary decisions in the planning area can often be contested. I would prefer any consultation to have a statutory structure. My suggestion was that we would use the PPN. I propose that residents associations would register with the PPN and, just as local councillors get informed of planning applications, the secretariat of the PPN would distribute notification of pre-planning meetings to those associations. That would be a very simple system. PPNs are already part of our local government structure. People are already paid to be on the secretariat of a PPN. There are already residents associations that are members of PPNs. By use of regulation, we could, at pre-planning level, inform both local councillors and members of the PPN of pre-planning consultations. We could do that in the same way that you have a planning list. That would work very well. Local councillors would also appreciate that same facility.

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