But I'm thankful to correspondent Dan O'Sullivan for pointing me in the direction of County Wicklow for a story which is, quite simply, Burmese junta-esque.

To understand how Wicklow County Council's planning department has made itself front-runners for the 2007 Drawing Board Kafka Planning Award, I might have to explain a little bit about that part of the planning process known as 'validation'.

Validation is where, after your architect prepares a planning application on your behalf, the local authority goes through all the paperwork . . . drawings, application forms, newspaper ads and so on . . . to find flimsy reasons not to accept it as a 'valid' application and send it back to you marked 'invalid'.

Believe me, since this procedure was introduced in Ireland a few years back to 'speed up the planning process'(! ) there have been some incredible stories of how low local authorities will stoop to invalidate applications. However, Wicklow county council has somehow found a whole new way to rede"ne the term, 'how low a local authority will stoop'.

What happened was, in the middle of last year the department of the environment published another of its will-to-live-sapping revisions to the planning application process. One of them involved changes to the newspaper ad you're supposed to publish before you submit your planning application.

I guarantee that if the 99% of architects in the country who fell asleep before getting to Section 18 (i) of the more than 100-page document had managed to stay awake long enough, they still wouldn't have understood the slight change required to the wording of the newspaper ads which the new regulations outlined.

Briefiy, before the new rule took effect the ad you had to place in your local newspaper was supposed to inform interested parties that copies of your application could be 'purchased' from the local authority. But from 1 June of this year the newspaper ad was supposed to read as follows: "The planning application may. . . be purchased at a fee not exceeding the reasonable cost of making a copy, at the offices of the planning authority".

What's the big deal, I hear you ask? The site notice (that's the thing you put up on a stick outside your house to let people know you're making a planning application) is supposed use the 'exact same wording' as the ad you place in your local newspaper. Local authorities won't tolerate any difference. And local authorities, including Wicklow, 'very strongly advise' that you use the standard site notice they put up on their websites.

Now, if you're still following me, you'll notice from Wicklow County Council's website that its site notice still uses the old wording. This means that if you use its 'official site notice' and accompany it with the up-to-date newspaper wording, the two documents won't be worded the same way.

So this is what's happened: over the past few weeks Wicklow County Council has invalidated 70 planning applications solely on the grounds that the site notice and/or the newspaper ad didn't include the phrase "fee not exceeding the reasonable cost of making a copy". (At least two of the applications, I've since found out, involved prestigious projects which might have left the project sponsors wondering what type of ninnies they were dealing with and why they didn't take their business somewhere else. ) Anyway, I contacted Wicklow County Council last week about the situation. I felt sorry for the young spokeswoman whose boss delegated the stress of trying to fob off an old crank like me with the following: "The responsibility for using the correct wording in newspaper ads and site notices lies solely with the applicant and not with the local authority.

Otherwise a member of the public could challenge the application in the courts."

What nonsense. In a document published by the department of the environment just this year to assist local authorities on planning matters, including validations, there's a line that says: "planning authorities should adopt a reasonable approach towards validation. . . planning authorities should take a common sense approach and should avoid invalidating applications on very minor points".

Now, I don't know what you think, but I'm pretty sure that Wicklow is invalidating applications on very minor points. If they think they'll end up in court over something like this, they really have little to worry about.

Why is it that when there is some minor bureaucratic glitch in the planning system, the default position for the planning authority is to do everything in its power to cause maximum public fury?

In the private sector, if a situation like this arose in the course of a normal workday, this is probably the way things would have played out:

First a meeting would have been held to assess the importance of the problem and then, assuming the situation was assigned some kind of signi"cance, our most effective communicator would have been dispatched to the local radio station to explain why things had gone slightly wrong and what changes would be immediately implemented to reduce any inconvenience to our clientele. Then an email would have been sent to the architects who deal with the company most frequently explaining how any inconvenience could be avoided.

Having worked within the local authority system myself, I have "rsthand experience of how this 'common sense' response is spurned when minor problems are identi"ed . . . they are left to fester, and only ever addressed when some bad-tempered smart-ass writes a snippy article in a newspaper.

Garry Miley is an architect and author of web blog Planning Dispatch.

Visit www. garrymiley. com