Mayo councillors want changes in planning system

Several members of Mayo County Council have claimed there are "flaws" in the current planning system in Mayo.

Cllr Peter Flynn, who raised the topic at the January meeting of the local authority, said the old system, whereby an applicant would come in to the council and meet with a planner, seemed more effective than the current system being employed.

“I remember not so long ago a client would come in and meet with the likely planner and get a good indication of when an application would get over the line. They would work out the detail, the planner would then do the report, it would go to the head of the municipal district and they would make a decision, generally based on the guidance of the planner. 

"But now we have a situation where the senior planner seems to be involved in every application and that is resulting in certain situations where they will overrule the planner involved, so that by the time it comes to the head of the municipal district they simply rubberstamp what the senior planner has determined. This is not helpful and is saying 'we don’t trust the planners'.” 

Stating that decisions around some applications in West Mayo were “very difficult to understand”, Cllr Flynn formally proposed that the system return to its previous status whereby just the local planner was involved.

Cllr Patsy O’Brien supported the call and said councillors should have more of an input on planning matters, as they had in the past. 

“Planning files and applications were always discussed in a public forum before and that was always done with the consent of the person involved."

Cllr Richard Finn claimed councillors had failed to resist losing their planning powers in the first place.

“I can’t understand how we allowed this to happen, but we have to live with it now and it has limited our powers to progress our areas and is a restriction on local representatives and staff of our municipal districts. I just regard pre-planning as a waste of time and I agree that everything is going back now to senior planers and it is essentially becoming centralised, when a recommendation should be able to come from councillors and people of the area and community organisations about what they want and don’t want.” 

Cllr Damien Ryan said problems in planning were “the exception rather than the norm” and the system “runs very well generally”. However, he said that devolution of power down to local councils is a main objective on a government taskforce he sits on, adding: "The reason the municipal district structure hasn’t worked effectively is because funding wasn’t devolved down from government to make the new system work better and then there was a vacuum from the removal of town councils. Funding would be the first thing needed to address this.” 

• Published as part of the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.