Paddy Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the ambassador and wish her well during her stay in Ireland. It is great to see that Luxembourg has a full ambassador in Ireland.

I want to raise the issue of planning. The Fine Gael group of Senators had a great meeting yesterday with Niall Cussen from the Office of the Planning Regulator and previously the Department. I found it most interesting. At some stage, we should invite him to come before the House for a question and answer session. As someone who spent quite a long time on a local authority, there are many things I did not realise could be done and stipulated in county development plan or an area plan. In many cases where we have developments with a first, second and third phase those doing the building in the first stage can create a problem for the those working in the third stage if they do not go ahead with the development. Mr. Cussen was able to tell us there may a way around this. If a certain length of time is given to carry out the first stage and those involved are not prepared to do it, then the second or third stage should be allowed to go ahead and quite rightly so.

He said many other measures could be taken to help with planning. Local authority members should be educated on planning and there should be workshops for them. County managers, or chief executives as they are now, do not bring forward all of the information to local authority members when development plans are being put together. Mr. Cussen also said that variations of a plan can be done quite easily. He suggested it is not only the responsibility of the manager to bring forward a variation.I always felt that a variation of a plan could not take place unless the manager was willing to bring it forward. This is a grey area and one that should be explored.

Then the area of services and what services are came up. Are they roads, footpaths, public lighting and so forth? Some developments get planning or zoning turned down because of the lack of services. There is the question of who provides the services and why an area does not have services. While some planning applications have everything ready to go, the services might not be there and maybe the local authority should be working in conjunction with the applications. I am calling for a debate on this, and if we could bring Mr. Cussen into the House, it would be a worthwhile experiment.