Paddy Burke (Fine Gael)

We had no redress when we went back to my local authority and we got no suck from them either.

I also have been contacted by a resident in Lucan, County Dublin. This woman told me that one had only to witness the official vandalism visited by Dublin South County Council on the residents of south Lucan by the intransigent insistence on driving a major distributary route through the most densely populated part of west Dublin, thus sundering further the fragile community. She told me that over 300 trees have been mercilessly cut down, never to be replaced, in this venture — which was demonstrated at two oral hearings — and that it will not alleviate Dublin's greatest traffic problem, the gridlock in the Lucan area. What happened there will not alleviate the problem but it has divided a community, pushing the road through the most densely populated part of Dublin.

Whereas the Bill gives all of this power to An Bord Pleanála, heretofore a local authority decided and there was an appeals process where people could appeal to an independent body, An Bord Pleanála. If An Bord Pleanála will now be the body to which such matters will be fast-fowarded, will there be any independent appeals system afterwards or is a judicial review the only recourse open subsequently? This is an important point. It strikes me, from reading the Bill, that there will be no independent recourse for genuine objectors. Let us face the reality that there are communities who have been badly affected by certain infrastructure. While there are cranks out there as well for whom I do not have any great time, local authority members must have a genuine say on behalf of the people who elect them. The local authority members must have more of a say about the powers included in this Bill. It strikes me that people who are genuinely affected will have no recourse to an independent appeal other than through judicial review. We all are aware of the cost of judicial review. It is an enormous task to ask anybody to go the route of a judicial review if he or she has a grievance against a piece of critical infrastructure that is being put in place.