Sir, – That those in the State’s budgetary watchdog have chosen to conceptualise public participation in environmental decision making as a “planning and objection system” is concerning (“Up to 80,000 extra workers needed to address housing crisis, fiscal council says”, News, October 30th).
In a recent paper, University of Manchester planning and politics researcher Gareth Fearn describes how language not unlike this around planning reform in England has sought to shift accountability from those with structural power to those with much more marginal power.
Blaming increased timelines for projects just on deliberation (and not expanding on the impacts of the shortage of hundreds of professional planners, for example) is overly simplistic.
It seems that those responsible for holding Government to account when it comes to the public finances think there should be limits to scrutiny elsewhere. – Yours, etc,
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
Dr SEÁN A O’LEARY,
Crookstown,
Co Cork.