Hi Garry,
I'm sorry i didn't enter your 'invalidation' competition in the past. Last year I submitted a planning application to Clare County Council. Five weeks later a bulky package arrived in my letter box, application declared invalid due to newspaper notice bing out of date. I thought this odd as I recalled stopping at a newsagent on a Thursday on my way to the Planning Department to purchase the Clare Champion freshly delieverd to the shop that day. Having bought two copies of the paper I found my planning ad, tore off the full page of both papers, outlined the ad in red on both pages and proceeded to drive to the planning office. I submitted the application. Apparantly the technician decided that having submitted the application on a Thursday with the publication date on the Clare Champion dated the following day (Friday) my ad was 'out of date' by virtue of being dated before the date of publication. I don't understand or care why the Clare Champion is in the shops on Thursdays but dated the day after, but can an original newspaper page be 'too early'? Clare County Council thought so at the time but seem to have changed their minds since. My client lost alot of time because of this!

On another issue, I had a meeting with a planning officer of Clare County Council (who shall be nameless but has recently left). This planning officer was hoping up and down and pointing at a site layout plan spread out the table, stabbing the paper with her finger and loudly noting that the sight distance line on the map indicated impossibly poor visibility at the juntion of the site access and the public road. I moved closer to the drawing, quite concerned as I had previously established from a site survey that adequate sight distances were available. I looked again at the planner's finger and politely asked her to show me the line she was talking about. I took a deep breath and told the planner that the line she pointing at was a telephone line between two telephone poles. The planning officer sat down and said that she wanted a larger scale site layout map submitted as 'unsolicited further information'!