I welcome the ambassador and wish her well during her stay in Ireland. It is great to see that Luxembourg has a full ambassador in Ireland.

I want to raise the issue of planning. The Fine Gael group of Senators had a great meeting yesterday with Niall Cussen from the Office of the Planning Regulator and previously the Department. I found it most interesting. At some stage, we should invite him to come before the House for a question and answer session. As someone who spent quite a long time on a local authority, there are many things I did not realise could be done and stipulated in county development plan or an area plan. In many cases where we have developments with a first, second and third phase those doing the building in the first stage can create a problem for those working in the third stage if they do not go ahead with the development. Mr. Cussen was able to tell us there may be a way around this. If a certain length of time is given to carry out the first stage and those involved are not prepared to do it, then the second or third stage should be allowed to go ahead and quite rightly so.

He said many other measures could be taken to help with planning. Local authority members should be educated on planning and there should be workshops for them. County managers, or chief executives as they are now, do not bring forward all of the information to local authority members when development plans are being put together. Mr. Cussen also said that variations of a plan can be done quite easily. He suggested it is not only the responsibility of the manager to bring forward a variation.

I always felt that a variation of a plan could not take place unless the manager was willing to bring it forward. This is a grey area and one that should be explored.

Then the area of services and what services are came up. Are they roads, footpaths, public lighting and so forth? Some developments get planning or zoning turned down because of the lack of services. There is the question of who provides the services and why an area does not have services. While some planning applications have everything ready to go, the services might not be there and maybe the local authority should be working in conjunction with the applications. I am calling for a debate on this, and if we could bring Mr. Cussen into the House, it would be a worthwhile experiment.

I would like to continue on the commentary of the previous Senator. Mr. Cussen is a regular attender of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage, on which all parties in this House are represented. I do not suggest he comes into the Seanad. We have a very strong, active, robust and proactive committee that has members. He is subject to regular questioning, it is cast on the web, and the councillors are aware of every single meeting of the committee because I personally send them a link to it, and he does an excellent job. The councillors do not need a lesson from the Office of the Planning Regulator. There are ten publications that he has worked on, he runs regular training sessions with the Local Authorities Members Association, LAMA, and the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG. Senator Burke's party and all other parties engage effectively with them and that is the proper process. It is not for the Seanad to be asking sectoral individuals to come in for questioning. I say that respectfully to the Senator. There is a committee, of which I am a member and the Senator's colleagues are hardworking members of it, and we do our work well. Mr. Cussen engages very well with it, as does the regulator. As the Senator has given me the opportunity, I salute the AILG and LAMA for their publications and seminars and for inviting Mr. Cussen to engage with them. I wanted to make that point. It was not one I intended to make, but as the Senator brought it up, I thought it relevant to do so.

I support the Leader's proposed Order of Business. I mention my Private Members' Registration of Wills Bill. I brought a Private Members' Bill to the House in 2021, which was debated extensively by all Members of the House, and the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, suggested it be parked for nine months. That was somewhat disputed but we had a vote on it and took that decision. Eighteen months have elapsed since and there has been no traction or ongoing support on what has been happening, so I brought a Commencement matter on it to this House yesterday and we had a detailed response from the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien. The bottom line is that the Minister of State is not supportive of a register of wills. I want to flag my intention to the House that the Bill is restored to the Order Paper, as item No. 50, and my intention is to proceed with a re-reading of that Bill and to pursue the importance of it. I just want to let the House know that.

With the co-operation of the House I will take Senator Black next as she has another engagement.