Planning guidelines 'nightmare' warning

Regional planning guidelines currently being drafted represent the removal by stealth of the power of local authorities to develop their counties, a conference was told yesterday.

Addressing delegates at the 21st annual Local Authority Members Association (LAMA) conference in Ennis, Cllr Brian Fitzgerald, of Meath Co Council, said: "These guidelines come with a major health warning and if you read them closely, the guidelines will do nothing other than to over-rule county development plans."

Cllr Fitzgerald claimed that the guidelines pose the greatest danger to the development of counties by elected council members and officials. He said: "If the drawing up of these guidelines are not policed carefully by regional authority members, we will have serious problems."

Cllr Fitzgerald claimed the drawing up of the regional planning guidelines are being driven by consultants and some public officials who base their plans on theory and have no understanding of the practicalities councillors face and the needs of ordinary people.

He said: "They don't give any real logical reason for many of their proposals and the guidelines could become a planners' nightmare."

During a question and answer session however, the assistant secretary in development and planning at the Department of the Environment, Ms Mary Moylan, said the regional planning guidelines are critical to achieve the objectives contained in the National Spatial Strategy.

She said: "That is why they are so important and a lot of work is going into their adoption at the moment. The Act requires that local authorities must have regard to the guidelines and that means that the guidelines cannot be ignored."

The head of planning at Clare Co Council, Mr Ger Dollard, said that much of the national debate on planning has focused on one-off housing in the countryside. However, Mr Dollard said that houses by themselves will not rejuvenate the countryside.

Earlier, the chairman of the Association of Health Boards, Cllr Jack Bourke, told delegates that abolishing health boards and replacing them with a monolithic health executive was a retrograde step.