Apologies have been received from Senator Stephenson. At the outset, I wish to advise members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

The first item on the agenda is the minutes of the meeting of 25 March, which have been circulated. Are they agreed? Agreed.

Before we move on to correspondence, I want to mention the Critical Infrastructure Bill, which passed Second Stage in the Dáil last night and has now been referred to our committee. There was no vote called last night, so it was actually passed last night. It is not part of the voting block today. I propose that the select committee meet next Wednesday at 4 p.m. to consider Committee Stage of the Bill. Is that agreed? Agreed. I would stress that it is the select committee next week that will consider that legislation. The reason it is the select committee is because the Dáil has to do this Committee Stage. It will then go to the Seanad and Senators will have to deal with it there.

That is perfect. We will have a few weeks off.

While we are a joint committee of TDs and Senators, because it is legislation, Committee Stage has to go through the Dáil select committee and then it will go on to the Seanad separately. Is that agreed? Agreed.

I am sorry; would the Cathaoirleach mind giving the rough timelines of it?

The intention is that we will have Committee Stage of the legislation next Wednesday, as we just agreed. I think we will be able to complete it in one sitting. I do not know how many hours that will take. A lot of members said last night that it is a very short Bill.

It is, yes.

It is not very technical. People said it is an easy read.

Aspirational.

Fine; we will save that until next week. I expect that we should be able to complete it in one sitting because it is a short Bill with the amendments, depending on what amendments are brought forward. It will then go back to the Dáil for Report Stage about two weeks later. Then, it will move on to the Seanad afterwards.

How long will it take it in the Seanad?

It will take a number of weeks.

Then it goes back to the Dáil. It is done then.

No, once the Dáil is finished, the Dáil is finished. Then, it goes to the Seanad. When the Seanad is finished, it goes to the President for signature.

Okay.

It will take maybe a few months with Senator Higgins' amendments.

We are in public session so through the Chair, please.

That is okay.

It will be in the Seanad on a couple of occasions subsequent to our committee completing it.

The next item is correspondence. There are six items of correspondence. The first item relates to additional information gathered on access officers in county councils. This correspondence relates to additional information sought due to the Disability Federation of Ireland requiring updated data collected from specific county councils. The data was requested arising from the committee members' engagement with the Disability Federation of Ireland at a meeting on 11 February 2026. It related to Louth, Meath, Clare, Longford and Roscommon county councils and Waterford City and County Council, which had not designated a disability officer in their local authorities. We now have the complete list of the disability officers in all the counties throughout the country. We want to make sure it is complete and up to date. We will note and publish that.

The second item of correspondence is No. 21, additional information provided by the County and City Management Association. This correspondence was received from the County and City Management Association arising from its meeting here on 18 February, providing answers to queries raised by members of the committee. It relates to a question raised about the progress on reviewing and amending local authority development plans to facilitate land being rezoned for housing as requested by the Minister, Deputy Browne. I have a significant issue with the correspondence we have received from the CCMA. I will give the context. All local authorities were asked by the Minister last July, nine months ago, to prepare a variation of their respective county and city development plans for zoning for additional housing to meet the housing targets. There is a two-page reply from the local authorities, and it is wholly unsatisfactory. The charts they have given us are difficult to follow, but in essence they are saying that four local authorities have completed the review of their city and county development plans. They have not told us which four. Fourteen of them have gone to public display, so there has been consultation and meetings with the councillors. They have received submissions and have gone to public display. They are at that stage. When they come back from public display, I think the planning department has one month to do its report for the chief executive, and the chief executive has one month to bring it to the local authority for approval or otherwise. However, 13 local authorities have not commenced the public display yet. They were asked to do it last July. That is utterly unacceptable. I propose straight away that through the CCMA we get the names of those 13 councils which have not commenced the public display nine months after they were asked to do so. We will request the chief executives - not the cathaoirligh - to attend here in person at the first opportunity. I think that will be in two weeks' time. Is that agreed? Agreed. There is no point in the Government saying X, Y and Z, and local authorities carrying on as if it did not happen. All 13 chief executives are requested to appear here. Fourteen are at public display, which is slow but concrete progress. Four have it done. Maybe that is a timing issue and four were at their development plan. I do not know. However, 13 have not gone to public display. That is utterly unacceptable.

It seems that some local authorities are a law unto themselves. When something like this comes down from Government it is ignored. This is a disgrace. As we all know, we have a housing crisis throughout the country. This total disregard for a request made by the Minister is shocking and they should be here to answer our questions in a couple of weeks' time.

We will take it that is agreed. We will get from the CCMA the names of the respective 13. I want those letters to be sent to the chief executives of each of the local authorities within the week, so they have ten days. There is a simple answer. They have not done it, and they had better face up to it. There is no point in us talking in the Dáil about housing and so on, and almost half the local authorities nine months on have not even-----

They should be named and shamed.

They are your words. Okay. That is that item of correspondence.

From my experience, I agree with the Deputy that a lot of the local authorities are a law to themselves because they are not held accountable by the Department of housing, local government or committees. I welcome that we are looking to hold them accountable, but you could get ten of them that will have the information for us within the coming two weeks and I could nearly guarantee that from my experience. Then again, the whole 13 of them could refuse to show up to the committee. Do we wait for that, or do we plan ahead? What is next?

We will tell them they are required. It is not a polite invitation if it suits their diary. The wording will be that they are required to attend.

What if they do not?

We will ask in the correspondence that they confirm their attendance. We will check 48 hours or three days before.

The Cathaoirleach will have his work cut out for him, but that is great.

We will ask them to confirm it within a period, and that will give us time to make direct phone calls if necessary. I see there is a vote upcoming in the Dáil. We have no option but to suspend until after the vote.

We are reviewing correspondence we have received since our last meeting. No. 22-2026 is a letter from the Department inquiring whether the committee would like to do pre-legislative scrutiny on the arterial drainage (amendment) Bill 2026. We have received substantial amounts of documentation from the Department on the regulatory impact analysis that was prepared, a 2026 policy paper from the Department, the general scheme of the 2025 Bill and a summary of the main item. There is a lot of documentation. I suggest people have a look at it themselves, and we will come back to it at the next meeting and decide. Maybe we will take a briefing or pre-legislative scrutiny. We can definitely take a briefing. There is a lot of documentation that, in fairness, people would not have had time to fully digest, since we received this correspondence recently. We will hold that over for decision at the next meeting. If people want a briefing from the Department or the OPW, we will arrange it at that stage.

No. 23-2026 is an offer from IBEC to brief the committee on the recommendations contained in its report on regulation entitled Our Infrastructure Ambition: Principles for Better Regulation. This report is linked to the fact that the Government is due to publish a circular in the near future on the principles of better regulation. IBEC has produced a substantial document in this case. Rather than just noting and publishing it, I suggest that people review this correspondence and maybe we will note and publish it at the next meeting. We have had IBEC in a couple of times already. We will digest that for the week, come back and then decide to note and publish it or whether we want to do further work on it at that stage, but we will decide then.

No. 24 was correspondence received from the Construction Industry Federation, CIF, forwarding a link to a news article from the Irish Independent on the first section of the N5 upgrade. It is just a photograph of the particular day, so I suggest we note and publish that. It is just an article from the Irish Independent.

No. 25 is the SDLP request to meet with the committee on its report on infrastructural investment. This correspondence was received from Claire Hanna MP and Socal Democratic and Labour Party leader in the Northern Ireland Assembly. She requests to meet the committee to present the findings of the SDLP's recent report, Success by Design, which sets out a framework for infrastructure investment as a central driver of economic growth, enhanced cross-Border co-operation and the long-term foundations of a successful new Irish economy. I suggest that we circulate this to the members of the committee. We just received an email. I suggest we circulate the report that Claire Hanna MP has sent to the committee for people to have a look at. Perhaps we might have an informal meeting, but this is a document produced by one political party. I would be slow to get into this document because every party here could send us documents and request a formal meeting.

As an island, we do infrastructure with our backs to each other. I understand most other political parties have access to the floor of the Dáil and committees to put forward their documents. The SDLP does not do that. The Good Friday Agreement committee allows for North-South parties to attend. It might be a good initiative to give the SDLP an official platform just to discuss it, maybe along with another group at some stage.

The Good Friday committee.

I agree completely with what Deputy Tóibín said. It also might be good idea to see if we could maybe engage formally with the infrastructure committee in the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont. That is important. As the impetus for constitutional change is only going in one direction, we should start looking at that as a committee on an all-Ireland basis. This invitation from the SDLP is very welcome. While this committee may not be the appropriate forum, we definitely should have some sort of a formal structured engagement with our northern counterpart.

I fully agree with my colleagues with regard to working with our people north of the Border, but we need to do it in a very structured manner. There is no point in bringing them down here to a committee and then we all ask them the same questions. It needs to be done in a better manner than that. I find sometimes that we come in here to our committees, we listen to the opening statements, and then a lot of times the questions we ask are for people's social media. A lot of the time questions get repeated. If we are bringing people who are coming a long distance, and we want to build a serious relationship, we should do it in different manner.

How do we do that?

I do not know but we should think about it and maybe come up with a couple of ideas. I feel that we are letting ourselves down if we go about it in the normal way.

Is the Good Friday committee-----

It is great that the Good Friday Agreement committee operates on an all-island basis but there is room for that reform to spread out through all the committees. The A5 is a road for Donegal as well, the all-Ireland rail line project affects us all and we are one energy market. There is a lot of overlap. Deputy Sheehan's suggestion about the infrastructure committee in the North and this committee meeting in a structured fashion is an excellent one. It would be useful, maybe not to have one meeting just for the SDLP, but if we were meeting a couple of smaller groups on a particular day, to have them in might be useful. The only difference between formal and informal is that we have a public session. We are still physically here.

Yes, correct.

I would like to come in on that as well. Rather than having the situation we normally have where we are in and out and up and down, maybe we could have a meeting where we sat down, shared views, talked across the table from each other and limited the amount of time that people were getting up and leaving the meeting.

This is a slightly different point but I was wondering in future should we bring in the witnesses first and then do the correspondence afterwards? I am conscious that people are very busy.

I take your point. It is just because the Dáil was not sitting for the last couple of weeks that we have more correspondence than normal.

I know. There is a lot there.

What would happen once the witnesses go is that members may disappear and we might not-----

We have parliamentary party meetings on Wednesday evenings. It could be anywhere at 5.30 p.m. or 6 p.m.

It is just that these guys have been waiting for an hour now.

Yes, but we had the Dáil vote as well. We are subject to that.

I would not be surprised if we got another one.

Okay, what are we doing on this?

Can we do an official meeting with them? I propose we do.

With the SDLP on its own?

Yes, but I am not saying we prioritise it in time. If there is occasion where one or two groups are coming in, we fit them in in that scenario.

Is that reasonable? Okay. We will proceed on that basis and put them on the list.

Are we going to do the normal type of meeting where we sit down and let them talk?

The SDLP wants to make a presentation on the infrastructure plan it has. I imagine that listening to that and then teasing it out with the representatives is probably the fairest thing. I take Deputy McCormack's point about people asking the same questions, but every political system in the world, unfortunately, has that.

I attended a meeting this morning. We come in here sometimes and there might be three of us here. Then all of a sudden one or two members go, then two come in and there are four of us here and then we are back to two members again. It is not really fair on somebody like members of the SDLP who take the time to travel down here from the North to discuss their infrastructure plans if we do not sit down and respect and listen to them as a group.

Would that not apply also to people who come from Donegal or Kerry?

Okay, I know, but at the same time I feel that because they are making the effort-----

We will put this on the list for future meetings and we will come back to it as part of the work programme.

Where are we on the work programme, for future meetings?

Next week we will have Committee Stage of the infrastructure legislation. The following week, we will meet the chief executives of the 13 local authorities that have not even put their variations to their county plans on public display, having been asked to do so last July by the Minister. That will be in two weeks' time. The meeting immediately after that will be a briefing on the new arterial drainage legislation. We will finalise the following weeks' meetings but those are the meetings for the next three weeks.

We have finished with correspondence. Before we move onto the next item I want to inform the committee that our colleague, Jennifer O'Dowd, is finishing with the committee next week and taking up a position with the Oireachtas EU Presidency team. We thank her for all her work and wish her the very best in her new role. Naomhán Mhaonaigh will take up Jennifer's role. I welcome Naomhán, who is new to the committee and the Oireachtas, here today as well. We will now suspend the meeting while our visitors take their seats.