Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will probably get a great deal of agreement across the House that this process is very rushed. It is lastminute.com. We are dealing with planning. I think we could all accept that we started from a point of having very poor planning regulation in this State. We all know what the impact has been on regular people in that regard. Much of that has been in the public domain for many years. Reference has already been made to some of the tribunals.

We also heard from some of the major stakeholders such as Transport Infrastructure Ireland, National Broadband Ireland and many others, which point out the flaws in our planning process. That is the reason the Attorney General's review is ongoing. I believe there are stakeholders' meetings happening in terms of reviewing. I am very interested in how that process is working. I would like to think there is some sort of overlap with the process with which the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, is engaged.

Like many others, I have serious qualms about the substitute-consent process becoming a single-tier operation, as opposed to being a two-stage operation. There is room within the two stages for a greater amount of public consultation and involvement. I agree with the point many previous speakers have made to the effect that an awful lot of our planning difficulties and problems across the board are due to the fact that the pre-planning or consultation piece has not been done as well as it could have been. We have all seen where good planning has been put into action. We have seen where it has been done well by organisations in terms of wind farms, roads or whatever else and where there has been consultation with people who have been involved from a very early stage. Sometimes, problems have been caught early and they have been addressed. We have also seen where it has been done badly and where people's backs have rightly been got up in a community and then we sometimes end up with a situation where there are no winners. We must ensure that whatever changes we are going to make that public involvement and consultation are put at the top of the agenda.

A number of amendments will come forward relating to judicial reviews and a range of subjects that I do not have time to talk about at this stage. We do not like how this process is being conducted and we believe that there are serious qualms in regard to this planning legislation. The fact is that we do need to review the system and to improve it. It would be far better if we involved the Oireachtas in a longer, more elongated process to produce what would be better planning laws.

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