Campaigner Seeks Order on Bord Pleanala Fees

national | rights, freedoms and repression | press release Friday April 03, 2009 20:46 by Brian Guckian

Fee Regime Locks Citizens Out of Planning Process

PRESS RELEASE

For Release 2/4/2009

AN ORDER capping the level of fees charged to members of the public by An Bord Pleanala for making submissions on planning proposals has been sought from Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley TD by a sustainable transport campaigner, Brian Guckian.

Mr. Guckian said that the € 50 fee now frequently being demanded by the Board for the right to make submisisons was unjust and served to lock Citizens on low or medium incomes out of the planning process.

The Board was refusing to take into account the individual circumstances of Citizens and its demands for unacceptably large payments could be construed as extortionate, he said.

Mr. Guckian said that the Board's fees were not legally binding under the Planning and Development Act 2000 and that he had applied for legal aid in February in order to address the issue, but the Free Legal Aid Centre (FLAC) had been unable to assist due to lack of resources.

He also said that a European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling of November 2006 giving Ireland the right to charge Citizens fees for submissions on planning proposals was unsound as it had uncritically accepted a disingenuous argument that fees were needed to cover administration costs. However, An Bord Pleanala was not a private enterprise but was a state body funded by Citizens via their taxes and was fully accountable to them, he said.

Exclusion of Citizens from the planning process in this manner was contrary to EU Directives such as those on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), as well as the 1998 UN Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, to which Ireland was a signatory.

Mr. Guckian added that he was also seeking a statutory inquiry into the operations of An Bord Pleanala as they had rarely acted impartially or satisfactorily in the particular area of road construction scheme assessment. He said that a study carried out by the Dublin-based sustainable development organisation FEASTA in association with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2006 had found very serious shortcomings in the Board's assessment and decision-making processes in relation to road schemes.

The Board's essentially automatic granting of approval to such schemes over the last 15 years was in contravention of government policies on sustainable transport and climate change, and it bore considerable responsibility for the 165% increase in Irish transport emissions since 1990, as recently reported by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

ENDS

Contact: Brian Guckian 087 9140105 railprojects@eircom.net