Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The increase in the number of judicial reviews in this country coincides completely with the introduction of the strategic housing development, SHD, planning process. That is because SHDs bypass local democracy, so there was not an opportunity for people to put in planning objections to local councils. They only had the opportunity to raise objections with An Bord Pleanála. If that failed, the only course open to them was judicial review. The fact is that more than 90% of the judicial reviews relating to SHDs were successful. This indicates that those people were 100% correct in bringing those reviews and that the fault is not with them for bringing the reviews or for clogging up the judicial system, it is with bad planning and bad planning laws and comes down to an inability on the part of people to engage with democracy and planning decisions at local level.

I note the Government has decided to do away with the strategic housing developments, SHDs, but it gave so much time and opportunity to developers to launch hundreds of in local communities. We are dealing with these. I deal with them in north Wicklow and every few weeks there is another application which people want to object to. Can the Tánaiste respond to those issues please?

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