Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Is it possible to get a copy of the Minister of State's speech circulated? There seem to be a specific number of amendments coming in and as Senator Warfield says they have not been addressed. We do not want to see a situation - although this would not be overly problematic - like when the whole forestry section was dropped into the fur farming Bill two weeks ago. It is not a good way to do legislation and it would be good for us to have a chance to look at that. We will work with the Minister of State on this but it is fair that we get information on what amendments are going in.

This Bill is intending to amend the 2000 Act to provide for a single stage application process. I want to focus my comments on some of the amendments we might propose on Second Stage, particularly around the area of public participation in our planning process and where that planning relates to quarries. Quarries have significant environmental impacts and we know about that from the Derrynane judgment. Through the SHD system and the housing process we have seen that SHDs undermined people's faith in the planning process and made them believe they had no say in it. Then the planning process got clogged up within the courts system. Public participation, as difficult as it can be for some people, is not something to be undermined, particularly when it relates to environmental impact surveys. Instead of facilitating the two-stage application process with public participation at both stages or even a robust pre-consultation process, the Government has reduced it to a one-stage process in this Bill. For something as important as substitute consent or retention permission that has such environmental impacts it is important that we have robust public participation. That is not to say that public participation should stop or slow up things, but if people are brought along on a process a much better system often emerges at the end.

My final point relates to what the Bill deems to be "exceptional circumstances". This should be considered at more than one stage of the process when such a significant environmental impact on communities is at stake. That is where we will be focusing our amendments. We ask the Minister to circulate a copy of his speech so we can get a clearer idea of what will be changed and amended on Committee Stage. I would hope the changes will not be so significant that we do not have the opportunity to raise them here and propose amendments on Committee Stage, which will lead on to Report Stage. I ask that we could possibly come back and do it again if that was the case.