Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

I said earlier, on Committee Stage, that I very much shared Senator Bannon's ambition that decisions should be made as quickly as possible. The Senator is quite right. We are talking about strategic infrastructure, which is an enormous gain for the community as a whole. It is therefore important we make decisions quickly, certainly more speedily than at present. In my constituency there is a piece of strategic infrastructure that has been tied up in the planning process for 12 and a half years. If I could get it down to 12 and a half months, I would be lucky. However, there are cogent arguments against bringing it right down to 12 weeks. A decision has to be made within 18 weeks, so the board is required to take the full period in which to reach it. The amendment is somewhat unrealistic, however, given the size of the projects we are talking about. Some of them will be of massive scale requiring a high level of quality in terms of the process and decision making involved. In practice, therefore, 18 weeks is the shortest feasible time within which the board can give thorough scrutiny to projects, especially in cases where oral hearings are required. In comparable cases in terms of size currently before the board, namely, local authority cases, the board made decisions in three quarters of them within the 18-week period. I therefore regard 18 weeks as quite ambitious.

As the Senator mentioned the last day, I have agreed to increase the board's staffing by an additional 24 people. That should ensure that the board can deal with ordinary appeals and absorb the new work. However, I think that to reduce the time interval from 18 to 12 weeks would be unwise because it would be overly ambitious. I share the Senator's ambition, nonetheless, that we should make these decisions as quickly as possible — and 18 weeks is probably getting it right.