Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

That is precisely the problem. If this change to planning legislation had been included in the Planning and Development Act which we spent two years passing through the House, as a committee we could have asked, for example, planning law experts, professional planners and legal experts who specialise in Aarhus Convention compliance their views on this. One of the points I made on Second Stage was that it is hard to understand why this provision was not proposed in the legislation from last year, given that future planning applications from the relevant sections were enacted.

The difficulty for us here is, of course, that while the Minister's predecessors told us that Bill was Aarhus-compliant, some important sections of that were found by the Aarhus Convention compliance committee not to be in compliance. The people whose job it is to independently assess whether a state's legislation is in compliance with the convention told us we were not. I accept these were specific sections of the legislation. Being expected to take the Government at its word when there has been a history of poor compliance or non-compliance is problematic and I will be pressing the amendment.

I am aware the Minister has a legal background. We will be coming back with more planning legislation. I suspect the that we have seen in previous years will be repeated and this issue will come back repeatedly. If it is found that legislation passes through here and it is not compliant or it undermines the important elements of public participation, all I will say is we warned and highlighted this here.

We do not want to see planning permissions delayed or have them fall foul of viability, but nor do we want to see good-quality planning applications for infrastructure or housing fall foul of legal challenge because of poorly drafted and enacted legislation or non-compliance with our European and international obligations. I state that not necessarily for a response but because these are very serious issues. These are issues the Minister's predecessors did not get right despite the fact that they used some of the same language as the Minister has brought here today.

I urge the Minister not to repeat their mistakes, so that we get the planning legislation right for the people who need it.

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