Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. We have had a good and positive debate. It is a start. It is a conversation. One of the things I like about our engagement here today is that everyone across the House got involved. I thank the Members who came to the House today to participate and gave up their time for this important legislation. I thank the Minister of State for his understanding. I said at the outset that this Bill is not perfect and is not our full recommendation. It is about getting a conversation going and engaging. It is about collaboration. We have to progress. My colleague Senator McDowell made a very good point. We want to encourage people into ownership of protected structures. We need to look at our vernacular and industrial architecture. Indeed, we need to look at our marine architecture, which is very significant on the island of Ireland.

It is very important that we support conservation officers. They have a meaningful role. In the council where I live, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, there are architectural conservation officers tied in with the architects department, which is separate from the planning department. We need to break down those demarcations because architecture, town planning, conservation and heritage, culture and biodiversity have to interplay and there has to be a greater synergy between them all. I am delighted with the Minister of State's commitment to look at extending this and his belief that we should have a conservation officer everywhere.

I thank everyone who has participated in the debate on the Bill. As Senator Fitzpatrick said, we are working extensively in the committee, as is the Government, on reform and consolidation of the Planning Acts. The Attorney General is doing a lot of work with all the Ministers in the Department. That is progressive. Hopefully a lot of this will inform and contribute to that debate.

There is one point we did not discuss today, namely, information planning, IT planning and e-planning. It is very onerous for an owner of a protected structure or a building within an architectural conservation area in some cases. They must furnish up to ten sets of plans and colour drawings to the planning authority at great expense. If Covid has taught us one thing, it is to embrace technology. There are local authorities in this country that do not even have colour scanners. If we want to modernise our planning system, we have to embrace technology. One of the best organisations in this country, the Irish Architectural Archive, is located in an amazing building at the end of Merrion Square, which can be seen directly out this window. I regularly bring planning applications and protected structure conservation drawings to that organisation and it welcomes them. Yet local authorities all around the country are throwing them in the bin. We have an issue there. We should have one repository for all this information. The Irish Architectural Archive acts as that. We need to look at that issue.

This has been a good day. It is a beginning and we look forward to working with the Minister of State in progressing the key objectives Senator Norris has set out in this Bill.