Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The core part of the legislation is restoring democracy to local authorities. We either believe in our planning system and our planners, who are eventually the ones to make the decisions regarding these large-scale residential developments, or we do not. I am not hung up on 10%, 20% or 30%. I believe we are being prescriptive and my preferred option would be to leave it to the planners to decide the level of commercial activity on any given site because no two sites are the same. The demands and what is required on each site are different. At the moment, the least productive thing is probably commercial and the most profitable is probably residential. At any time, things can change.

On what Senator Higgins said on scrutiny of planning permissions going through, this legislation restores that more than through the SHD process. The legislation provides an additional pre-planning process before a planning application is made. We have seen from the SHD process that the quality of applications being submitted when they go through pre-planning is far better than what it was in previous terms. Once the planning application is submitted, it goes through the normal planning process, where the public has the opportunity to make observations. The opportunity is also restored to the public to appeal to An Bord Pleanála. This restores further scrutiny on developments than what was in the SHD process. I do not agree with the Senator regarding the scrutiny.