Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I responded to the issue earlier when the Senator raised it. He is looking to hit home on it and that is fine. The Senator wants to emphasise the point. I have spoken to many councillors about this issue. I took the opportunity to meet informally with representatives from AILG today. I have also spoken to LAMA about these issues. We are looking at bringing forward a Bill. I have to get a legal draftsperson to make sure its wording is legally sound but I wanted us to have the debate today so we could get a full assessment and have a conversation around how best to do that from a policy perspective. I suggested earlier that during the nine-week statutory process of pre-planning consultations and consideration, councillors would be formally involved. The engagement would be part of the formal process and the results of that engagement would be part of An Bord Pleanála's consideration when they are considering the Bill.

On the issue of fees, which the Senator has also raised a number of times, one of the recommendations from the Mahon tribunal was that fees should be reduced significantly or they should be zero. The other planning Bill I referred to earlier is about implementing in law the Mahon recommendations on the planning system. We will deal with the fees issue there. I take the point that people who are democratically elected represent the viewpoint of communities. If they have an objection or observation to make during the planning process, we should certainly look at the cost of it and it should not be prohibitive. We will look at that in terms of whether we waive it altogether or look at something very small. I will come back on that perhaps when we are dealing with it later on.

We are trying to deal with the issues the Senator has raised. I am not the kind of Minister who wants to just bypass local government. People talk about bad decisions that were made and bad consequences, such as Oranmore. I do not know the details of that but it was the current system that delivered those decisions. The current system is not immune from mistakes either. The current zoning and planning processes have both made mistakes and caused damage to communities, which was added to by an implosion of the property sector and the banking sector on top of all of that. We are learning lessons from that and we are changing the planning system. That will be done in time as we do a review and we will have legislation on the back of that process. We will not rush it.

This is a different thing. It is about trying to get movement in the housing market because we desperately need it. Many people, as some of the Senators will know better than most, are living on the streets because of it on nights like last night and tonight. Some Senators are very concerned about that. We put measures in place to make sure that anybody who was exposed to rough sleeping last night or who will be tonight will be taken into a shelter to get out of the cold weather. We are working with NGOs, voluntary organisations and the system to make sure it can happen. Many of the shelters are taking in more people than they normally would. They are taking on extra staff beyond what they normally do to make sure we respond in a compassionate way to the risks that people face because they are homeless in weather like we are experiencing at the moment.