Dan Boyle (Green Party)

The Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1963 is thought off as seminal legislation in our legal canon. It was important in that it drafted, for the first time, legal principles on planning. It is disappointing that the means to enforce the principles included in that Act were never applied. The 1960s were seen as a time of attack on our built infrastructure. There were many campaigns to protect Georgian Dublin and the required personnel in local authorities charged to put in place these planning principles under the new legislation did not exist in many county councils until 30 to 40 later.

The planning process in many local authorities gave an undue amount of authority to the county or city manager and the development of a trained planning core has slowly come into being in many local authorities. Despite that, there is an imbalance in many local authorities in terms of their structures and their capability to define properly what is good and bad planning.

I listened with interest to Senator Coghlan's contribution and I am not sure if I would fully support what he said about the need to make a distinction between urban and rural planning. As far as I and my party are concerned, there are only two distinctions in planning - good or bad planning.