The long running debacle surrounding the Mayo development plan looks to be finally coming to a conclusion. Ian Douglas, senior planner for Mayo County Council told a meeting of the council: “The situation as far I know, is that the Department of Environment has agreed in principle to find some mechanism to finalise the plan that was agreed on March 23, that doesn’t compromise the Minister’s directive.”
Fine Gael Cllr Paddy McGuinness said: “It is probably fitting that my final words on this council are about the development plan. I hope that this will finally resolve the issue after a huge amount of work went into it.” Cllr McGuinness also went on to say that he hoped that the records of the work that went into getting this plan from the beginning to the end would be handed over to the county librarian so it can be kept and studied by future generations. “What we proposed to do was radical and innovative and we needed a lot of support from the officials in the county which we received.”
McGuinness and Murray clash over plan
However Cllr McGuinness did have one issue that he wanted to raise that he was disappointed with in the whole development plan saga. “It is disappointing that I have to enter one small note of discord. Cllr (Gerry ) Murray choose to hit out at the plan for political advantage recently, when he was one of the 31 signatories, and for one of 31 to break away for political advantage disappointed me.” Cllr Al McDonnell, who along with Cllr McGuinness was one of the spearheads on the development plan issue, also welcomed the news that the sags may finally be about to conclude.
Cllr Murray hit back at Cllr McGuinness’ disappointment saying: “Just to bring this right back to the beginning, there was an alliance between the two major sides in the council, people like myself and independents were left out of the decision making by the two major parities. I always felt from day one that this plan would not be as good as the old plan on some issues. The issue I raised was in relation to planning for areas under urban pressure and the granting of one-off housing in these areas. The old plan had a text chapter dealing with the issue, which gave the planners some latitude in granting permissions to people who had genuine need, while this plan has exact maps included which gives planners no latitude whatsoever to help out people. I have no problem whatsoever with stopping people from Dublin coming down to build one-off houses, but what I was talking about was genuine need for people from the area who want to live on their own family’s land. The old plan allowed for positive discrimination, we should have stuck with it and the text part of it, rather than the maps.”
