Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To go back to Deputy Boyd Barrett's question concerning there being no time limit on the retrospection, in a normal retention situation, someone goes and builds something, they apply for retention and they are allowed to do so. Substitute consent does not work like that and the Minister of State's officials will know this. Under the legislation we dealt with, and I am pretty sure it was the last round, when someone is putting in a substitute consent application, they can co-join with that a request to do additional new works as part of that substitute consent application. Sometimes, this could be to regularise or to fix a problem identified in the engagement, but sometimes it is just to expand the nature of their operations. There is a problem, therefore, if there is no time limit on that element of the "retention permission", which is the phrase we are now using. Potentially, then, within a substitute consent grant, or "permission" as we are now calling it, there could be an indefinite time within which the applicant for what we used to call substitute consent can deliver it. This is quite unusual.

People will remember that we had big rows over this element of allowing an application for new development to be rolled into a substitute consent development. Some of us opposed it very strongly. This is particularly the case, for example, sometimes regarding unauthorised peat farms and unauthorised quarries, etc. Perhaps the Minister of State could ask the officials to clarify whether - I offer my apologies, because it is late and I am jumping between three different phrases for the same thing - the application for retention permission is essentially a substitute consent application. Additionally, if the application is not only asking for consent for the unauthorised portion of the development but also for new additional developments, surely there should be some time limit on that, as there is with an ordinary planning application. Is the Minister of State absolutely sure that the answer to the question is that it does not have such a time limit? I hope this makes sense at this hour of the evening.