Six-year plan for county development formally adopted

The overarching plan, setting out the vision and blueprint for the development of the county over the next six years, has finally been agreed and is set to be published in the coming months.

The Cavan County Development Plan 2022-2028, incorporating a Local Area Plan for Cavan Town, will come into effect from July 11, 2022.

A meeting to decide on the Chief Executive’s Report on the Material Amendments Consultation Phase, the final stage in the overall CDP process, took place last Monday at the Hotel Kilmore in Cavan Town, May 30.

An updated report was issued to elected members back in April and included Material Amendments made to the initial proposed CDP presented to councillors back in February of this year.

In total 16 submissions were made to the material amendments passed by councillors when the draft plan last went to public consultation, including submissions from the Office of the Planning Regulator, the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, the OPW, other prescribed bodies, and members of the public.

Cathaoirleach of Cavan County Council, Cllr Clifford Kelly (FF), thanked the council’s planning team for their work in helping deliver the CDP - head of planning at Cavan County Council, Nicholas O’Kane; and senior planners Marice Galligan and Mairead Sheridan.

“It was a mammoth task to undertake and to bring through to fruition,” he said, added that he felt they had “put together a very good plan for the county”.

Director of Services, Brendan Jennings, remarked that it had been a “long two years” to get to the stage where the CDP could finally be formally adopted. He praised the councillors for their engagement over that period, through meetings and workshops, and expressed his belief that what had come from that was an “excellent [plan] that would be critical for our growth” over the coming six years.

Chief Executive Tommy Ryan agreed. He said “local knowledge” was important in that councillors were often best placed to guide the hand of the executive when it came to certain elements at a macro community level. “Where there was disagreement, we worked through it,” said Mr Ryan, noting that this was in essence “only the beginning” of the work in terms of implementing what is contained within the CDP.

Fine Gael’s TP O’Reilly said that finding consensus across the board on every intricacy of a CDP was never going to be an “easy task”, and Fianna Fáil’s John Paul Feeley thanked the executive for their closeness in working with elected members, adding that shared opinion was a “healthy” part of democratic discourse. “We had our disagreements and we had our votes.”

He said the CDP contained a “huge number of tasks” for the council to try to complete during the lifetime of the document, with Independent Brendan Fay stating: “We tried to get the balance as right as we could. What we do as a council, with national bodies, and with locals as well.”

See tomorrow's paper for detailed coverage.