Seanad debates

Tuesday, 23 November 2021

Planning and Development (Amendment) (Large-scale Residential Development) Bill 2021: Report and Final Stages

 

12:00 pm

Photo of Darragh O'BrienDarragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have no difficulty at all looking at what we can do here by way of reporting. The Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage, on which I served during the term of the previous Oireachtas, will regularly seek details overall. We would have seen details on SHD. Regarding even the division of the four different items, the Senator is being very prescriptive as to what is looked for, and I cannot give a guarantee that we will be able within the first 30 months to have those data. Of course we will have data, and what we want to see is a throughput of applications that are granted permissions. We are seeing activation of those permissions. We can look at what we could do, maybe through the Oireachtas joint committee. I will have a look at that between now and the Bill's passage through the Dáil to see if there is another mechanism we can use. All legislation is up for review at any stage. It will be open to Senator Ruane, as a Senator and a legislator, be it Dáil or Seanad legislation, to bring forward amending legislation that would mean that a Minister would have to come to the House if there were elements of the legislation with which she was not happy. This is a big piece of legislation and a lot of work has gone into it that we know will improve the SHD process, replacing it, taking what was good out of it, including the pre-application process, but then restoring our planning to local government.

I thank the Senator for the amendment. I cannot accept it here today but we will certainly look at elements of it to see whether they are workable.

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