Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage debate -
Thursday, 6 Jul 2023

Recent and Future Developments in An Bord Pleanála: An Bord Pleanála

An Cathaoirleach

We are joined by An Bord Pleanála officials. I welcome Ms Oonagh Buckley, interim chair, Mr. Chris McGarry, deputy chairperson, and Ms Bríd Hill, chief officer. The opening statement was circulated to members in advance.

I will read a note on privilege. I remind members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit, namely, Leinster House, in order to participate in public meetings. For those witnesses attending in the committee room, they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their contributions to today's meeting. This means they have an absolute defence against any defamation action for anything they say at the meeting. Both members and witnesses are expected not to abuse the privilege they enjoy. It is my duty as Chair to ensure that this privilege is not abused. 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 they comply with any such direction. Members and witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses, or an official, either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

I do not know how big an attendance we will have as people are tied up in other committees. We will take contributions in eight-minute segments. The officials have been here previously and know the routine. I invite Ms Buckley to make her opening statement.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I thank the Chair for the invitation to appear before the committee. I was appointed interim chairperson of An Bord Pleanála in January this year, having been appointed to the board by the Minister in December 2022. I am accompanied by deputy chairperson, Mr. Chris McGarry, and Ms. Bríd Hill, chief officer. An Bord Pleanála’s core function is to be the independent appellate body for planning applications and the primary decision-making body for major public and private infrastructure proposals, both onshore and in our marine environment. The board’s mission is: "To play our part as an independent national body in an impartial, efficient and open manner, to ensure that physical development and major infrastructure projects in Ireland respect the principles of sustainable development, including the protection of the environment." I will add that we also need to address the consequences of climate change in our decisions.

Following my appointment by the Government as interim chairperson in January 2023, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, appointed Mr. McGarry as deputy chairperson. I am delighted to say he has recently decided to reappoint him for a further term, which is good for continuity and corporate knowledge at board level. An additional 11 board members were appointed, all but one on an interim one-year basis, between January and April 2023, bringing the total number of board members to the statutory limit of 15. The increased capacity at board level will allow the board to work towards reducing the backlog of work that has built up over the previous two years, restoring timely decision-making with a view to reversing the downward trend in statutory objective period, SOP, compliance. I apologise for the many acronyms in An Bord Pleanála's work. If I start saying things members do not understand, please stop me. Timely filling of any future vacancies at board level and the appointment of permanent board members who will replace the public servants, such as myself, who have been appointed on an interim basis, will be necessary to ensure this. I am working closely with the Department to ensure that.

At the end of June, the board had a staffing complement of 221, of whom one third work within the planning inspectorate. More than half the staff of the board have been working in it for less than five years. The board has sanction from the Department to grow its staffing complement to 313 by the end of year, inclusive of 15 board members. We have run, and are running, competitions to recruit the staff we need, have a number of job offers out with people and intend to issue others soon. We will shortly prepare a further strategic workforce plan to submit to the Department in respect of 2024.

In 2022, the number of planning cases received was 6% fewer than in 2021, decreasing to 3,058 from 3,251. However, the total number of cases decided in 2022 was 2,115, a 23% decrease on the previous year of 2,775. By year end, the compliance rate for our statutory timelines for taking decisions on appeals stood at 46%. By the end of May, it was at 31%. Currently, 3,400 cases are on hand in the board awaiting analysis or decision, which is roughly a year’s intake. Of those, 1,100 have inspectors’ files discharged and are awaiting a decision by the board, which as the committee knows, now sits in meetings of a minimum of three members.

The situation has been significantly improved through the board last week doing what is known colloquially as a “blitz” on decisions, specifically of the normal planning appeal files. While these are smaller files, generally involving extensions or modifications to existing buildings, or one-off houses, they are very important. First, from a corporate perspective, they comprise a large part of the workload of the board, and were about a quarter of the files awaiting decision. Second, from the perspective of those who need our services, they are the key decisions to allow families put an extra bedroom into a roof space to meet the needs of a growing family, to provide an extra house in the garden, thereby using built-up land more sustainably for housing or for small businesses to improve the layout of their properties or to grow in line with their business needs.

I will depart slightly from my script. The board issued more than 135 decisions last week, which is a little over 10% of our on-hands decisions. In fact, we took approximately 181 decisions but there is a lag before those orders issue. They will now issue this week. Many people will see their cases decided and will get their orders this week, which will be great. A number of those were within the 18-week SOP period for taking decisions so some people, although regrettably not enough, have received the service from the board that they are entitled to expect. I anticipate that the board will repeat this approach of running multiple concurrent meetings dealing with many smaller files a number of times this year. However, it is not possible for the board members, who need time to read files thoroughly in advance and to write up their decisions afterwards, to do that every week nor is it possible to treat the larger case files, which require substantial time to read and decide, in that way.

Members will also appreciate that to manage our backlog while trying to move back into greater SOP compliance, the board has moved away from dealing with cases in strict chronological order and will apply differing prioritisation to its caseload. That is necessary in any case to ensure that we meet the statutory timeline for handling appeals for large-scale residential developments, LRDs, where otherwise the board would be subject to making a payment to the developer.

The board also has approximately 275 files where applications were made directly to the board relating to larger infrastructure, local authority or State cases. These can take substantial time to analyse.

In addition, at the end of May, some 76 strategic housing development, SHD, files remain with the board, of which 27 have inspector’s reports discharged and are awaiting a board decision. While dealing with the backlog will be a significant challenge, the increase in board membership, together with a number of other initiatives, including new efficiencies in the process used and the use of fee-per-case inspectors and overtime schemes, I anticipate the overall output of decisions will continue to increase throughout the second half of 2023.

An Bord Pleanála faces an increasing case load of judicial reviews, JRs, relating to its decisions. In the first five months of this year, 25 board decisions have been the subject of new JR applications. The board is, of course, still managing a few hundred JRs taken in the past few years. The recent appointment of a new head of legal services, overseeing an expanding in-house legal unit and the procurement of additional external legal supports, will help to ensure the board is better capable of absorbing changes in its legal environment due to legislation or precedent setting decisions and, therefore, making more legally robust decisions.

The significant new functions assigned to the board in legislation in the past few years are starting to impact the board’s workload. The board has restructured its inspectorate team into two groups dealing respectively with direct applications and appeals to ensure it can deal effectively with its existing and new infrastructure consent functions. A second director of planning has been appointed to oversee direct applications, including marine and climate planning. The first round of pre-application discussions on five climate-related marine projects under the Maritime Area Planning Act 2021 has been done.

In addition, 600 valid appeals relating to residentially zoned land tax under section 80 of the Finance Act 2021 were received in one week in May of this year and will require to be processed quickly. Those appeals comprise approximately 16% of our on-hands workload.

There are several priorities for the board for this year. Those include to reduce the backlog of work and restore timely decision-making to appeals and applications made to the board; to manage the new functions now assigned to the board; and to work through the actions set out in the board’s implementation plan, which we drew up in response to the recommendations in the Minister’s action plan for An Bord Pleanála and both reports by the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR. One of the most important initial actions we prioritised was to draw up and promulgate a strengthened code of conduct for board members and staff. I am happy to report that the new draft code was formally adopted by the board last week. Our other priorities are to work with the Department on the new planning legislation, in particular as it applies to the board, and starting the internal change process needed to move to the new governance model; and to recruit the people the board needs to carry out its critical national mission, including the permanent board members who will replace the public servants like myself who have been appointed on an interim basis. I thank my fellow public servants for volunteering to come to the board to help the organisation in this difficult period.

I am happy to take any questions the members of the committee may have.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I thank the witnesses. It is good to see them again. I appreciate all the work they have done in recent months. I have a number of questions. I will throw them out there and will come back in once the witnesses have responded. My first question relates to an issue Ms Buckley raised in her submission about legal costs. What were the board's total legal losses in 2022?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

The board spent just shy of €10 million on legal fees in 2022, of which approximately 50% were its own costs and 50% were costs paid to the other side. The board has a substantial outstanding deficit in legal costs. There are costs that are yet to be settled in cases where the board has conceded or lost.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I thank Ms Buckley. Does the board have the funds to cover the costs?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Because the board operates on an accrual accounting basis, we have a deficit on our books but we have a substantial cash balance in the bank. It is a funny situation that does not normally arise in public bodies. It is the result of the accrual basis on which we work. We have not, therefore, sought additional funding from the Department. Because of that substantial cash balance, there would be little point in doing so. It is most unlikely that all of those bills will land on a single day. In fact, it can be quite slow for the processes to grind through until we get a bill presented requiring us to pay our legal costs. Our own lawyers tend to be a bit more timely. The Department is fully aware of the situation with regard to the board's accounts and in the unlikely event that we did start to run out of money to pay those bills, we know we would have to approach the Department for a Supplementary Estimate. We are hoping over the next few years to work towards a situation where we are no longer running that accounting deficit on our books. We will work with the Department during the Estimates process of the next three years to try to reduce the deficit as it stands on the accounts.

Deputy Thomas Gould

What were the legal losses in 2021?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Is the Deputy asking about the legal costs?

Deputy Thomas Gould

The legal costs, yes.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

If memory serves, the cost was €7.9 million, so just short of €8 million.

Deputy Thomas Gould

There was an increase of €2 million between 2021 and 2022.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is correct.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Is there a deficit carrying forward from 2021 to 2022?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I understand there was a deficit carried forward from 2021 to 2022 and a further deficit has been carried forward into 2023.

Deputy Thomas Gould

It is concerning that legal costs are going up. As Ms Buckley outlined, more legal bills are coming down the track arising from decisions that went against the board or that the board-----

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is worth pointing out that half of those legal costs are our own legal costs. The board's legal costs are going up because more judicial reviews are being taken against the board. That is part of the issue. The other part of it, as the Deputy said, is that the board is conceding and losing cases. We are winning some, do not get me wrong, but we are conceding a number. If a case must be conceded, the trick is to concede as early as possible. That is how to minimise the cost to the Exchequer of a decision being remitted to the board and taken again. One of the things we are working on, and one of the reasons we needed to employ a head of legal services, was to have someone come in to create a litigation strategy and take those strategic decisions at the earliest possible point in the process so the cost to the Exchequer and taxpayer is minimised.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Looking forward to 2023 and 2024, does Ms Buckley estimate that the cost will stay the same or will increase? Has the board done an assessment? She outlined the number of cases that have already come forward in 2023. There are cases that have not yet been resolved. Are we looking at increased costs?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We have put in an estimate of approximately €7 million for legal costs this year. It is worth pointing out, as I mentioned, that we took in 25 JRs in the first five months of this year. That is a significant drop from the previous couple of years. That could be a feature of the fact that we were taking fewer decisions, of course, so that reduction may not survive. Judicial reviews tend to arise on decisions of the board, which is the final arbiter in these matters. However, my gut feeling is that the JRs we have taken in during the first six months of this year have been on an array of different types of decisions. They have not all been linked to SHDs, which some people have said are the cause of all this. From what I am seeing, that is not the case. I think that the board's rate of judicial review will remain at a high level. These are contentious decisions we are taking and people are incentivised to seek review of them. Because of a recent Supreme Court judgment in Heather Hill Management Company CLG and McGoldrick v. An Bord Pleanála, Burkeway Homes Limited and the Attorney General, it is most unlikely the board will be able to recoup its legal costs, even in circumstances where it wins cases - not that we recouped a great deal of costs in any case. It is, therefore, my view that the legal costs of the board will remain at a sustained high level for the future. There will have to be substantial provision made for that in every year's Estimate.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I thank Ms Buckley for her openness in that regard. I understand she is managing the situation in the board and trying to deal with these cases and costs. She said that almost €4 million was carried over into 2022. As an estimate, costs will be at least €7 million in 2023. The board will be looking at a continuing deficit. It could be €5 million, €5.5 million or €6 million next year. Would that be a fair assumption?

Ms Buckley mentioned Supplementary Estimates. Will there be a need for provision to be made in the budget this year to cover these legal costs?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We estimated we are carrying forward a deficit of some €5 million to 2024. We are going to try to work down that deficit over the coming three years. Our plan, working with the Department, is to try to achieve that. We do not believe we will need a Supplementary Estimate this year. As I mentioned to the Deputy, we actually have between €8 million and €10 million, depending on the time of year, in the bank in cash. We have more than enough to cover our ongoing daily costs. Our difficulty is that it can be quite slow for the other side to present their bills. It is a problem that arises in places where they are paying lawyers. The Legal Aid Board, which used to be in my bailiwick, has a similar problem. That is the cause of the deficit, in effect, and we know it is there. We have a good grasp of what we owe to people and what is solidified into a debt owed. The trick is trying to get people to present their bill and to pay them, or to get it through the taxation system. We will be working with the Department on that. I do not believe we will need a Supplementary Estimate this year to achieve that. We have submitted our estimate for next year to the Department and we will be engaging with it in the coming weeks.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley has estimated that the deficit for this year will be about €5 million.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

About €5 million going into next year.

Deputy Thomas Gould

That is €1 million up on last year.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I thank Ms Buckley.

Senator John Cummins

I thank the witnesses for coming to the committee this afternoon. It is much appreciated. I also appreciate that all cases are not equal. I put that as a proviso. How many decisions have been made in the first half of the year so far?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I do not have that figure with me. By the end of May, I think we had taken approximately 450 decisions. Even in the last two weeks, I think we took something in the order of 250 decisions. That is a substantial increase. It is a feature of the fact that we have more decision-makers. We have those 15 board members and over the last two months they have been trained up into taking those decisions and are therefore doing so in a faster and more established way. We also did the blitz on files last week that helped us to get there.

Senator John Cummins

I am trying to understand. The board made 2,775 decisions in 2021 and 2,115 decisions in 2022. I am trying to gauge if the board is in line even with last year, which was a 23% reduction on the year before.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Sorry, Senator, I have just been informed that we have taken 775 formal decisions in the first six months of this year. Some cases will be disposed of otherwise but those are formal decisions. The answer, bluntly, is "No". It is worth bearing in mind that while we are at 15 now, at a certain point the board's membership fell as low as four. The substantial number of additional decision-makers were appointed in March and April. They have required time to get up to speed on their roles. They are now up to speed. It is in the second half of this year that I expect output of decisions from the board will significantly increase. Unless we have the people to take the decisions, we cannot be taking decisions. That was the problem at the beginning of this year.

Senator John Cummins

Is there a target for the number of cases on which the board will make decisions by the end of the year? Is there a global target?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I am hopeful that we will be back to a normal on-hand workload, which would be about 1,200 to 1,400 cases, at year-end or probably into the beginning of next year. As I said in my opening statement, that is very reliant on the board being adequately resourced and on the decision-makers being replaced in a timely fashion by the Department and the Minister. It is that key resource of having decision-makers to take the decisions that caused the significant lag in capacity in the board, along with the capacity at inspectorate level. We are catching up on that.

Senator John Cummins

Just to be clear, to get to that level of 1,200 or 1,400 cases on hand, if there are currently 3,000 or 4,000 cases on hand, would require 2,000 decisions and no other files coming in between now and the end of the year. Is that a realistic target?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It requires us to take between 400 and 500 decisions a month. I think that is realistic, working flat-out. Mr. McGarry beside me will probably blanch because it is quite a challenge. It is something we are going to have to get to. I have committed to the Minister that, based on our experience in the first six months, if I feel that I need to approach him to follow the necessary process to appoint extra board members, I will do so.

Senator John Cummins

Okay. The initial priority is those 1,100 cases where the inspectors have already done their report and are awaiting board decisions. The others invariably take a considerable amount of work by inspectors in the background before they can get to the board. In terms of those initial 1,100 cases, the board is targeting decisions on them as a matter of urgency.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We are actually targeting the entire pipeline. We need to have the inspectors producing reports at a clip as well if we are to get on top of this backlog. That is being done. We have brought on fee-per-case inspectors who are hoovering up the work and delivering inspector's reports at a great rate. We are hiring inspectors as quickly as we can. We had three of them start this week, I think, and we have another two starting next week. We are building out that capacity and resource. It will take us that bit of time to build up and it is very reliant on us having those key adjudication posts filled. Those are the people who make the formal decisions.

Senator John Cummins

There is an 18-week period and then if a decision is not made in the 18 weeks, the board writes out to the appellant to say there are eight or ten further weeks. Is it eight or ten?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Generally we do write out. That has been the standard practice. I am sorry to say that was back when the board was on top of its backlog. Now I understand we commonly write out to people to say we cannot give an indicative date.

Senator John Cummins

That was the next point I was going to make. After the eight or ten weeks, we are telling people we cannot give a date at all. That is where the frustration is really building up within the system. People are very frustrated that they have no indication of a timeline. While I appreciate all the work and what I am asking here takes a resource, is there any way that we can tell somebody there is going to be a decision within three, six or 12 months? At least that would give people an idea. That is what we are trying to do in terms of the planning reform Bill, to give certainty on timelines. It is not certainty on decisions but on timelines so that people can build that into their processes. If it is a developer, they need to line up their supply chain and all the rest of it. Where are we at with giving people an indication of timelines?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I fully appreciate the frustration people must be feeling. This is not the service they are entitled to expect from An Bord Pleanála. We are trying to get back on top of that. As I said in my opening statement, a number of the files we dealt with in the last two weeks were within SOP. People who are in that happy place will get a decision within 18 weeks. We are trying to deal with the backlog from both ends, to deal with the older cases and pull them back, and any time we have a file that is within SOP, to deal with that as well, so we minimise the number of people who get caught in the situation. Unfortunately we are not in a position to write out and say people will get a decision in three, six or nine months. We are just not in a position to do that. Our best bet at this point is to try to get on top of this backlog and get back into a position where we are handling the majority of cases within 18 weeks.

Senator John Cummins

That is the difficulty here.

I appreciate that the board has a significant backlog but if we could get to a point where we are given some indication, even if it is three months, six months, or whatever it is, it would be helpful and would ease the frustration in the system at the moment. Perhaps it is something the witnesses will take away.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I would love to be able to do it myself. As the Senator can imagine, we have a lot of staff who take phone calls every day from people who are very frustrated. I am very conscious of the pressure it puts on my staff back at base in An Bord Pleanála. I am sure the committee members get it in the neck every day in their own constituencies. I would love to be able to do that and we are working as hard as we can to try to get back on top of things.

Senator John Cummins

I might come back in for the next round if that is okay.

An Cathaoirleach

I will bring the Senator back in for the next Fine Gael slot as I believe his colleagues are tied up in other committees. I will take the next slot and will then go to Senator Boyhan.

The witnesses are welcome and I thank them for attending. We have been seeking this meeting for some time and we appreciate them putting aside the time to come to the committee today, instead of being back at their desks making decisions.

An Bord Pleanála is up to 15 board members now, which is the maximum permitted under the legislation, and 11 of those are interim appointments. Is that correct?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

As it happens we are down to 14 as of today. One of my interim members has been promoted. I am told that his replacement will start on 1 August. In fairness to the Department, they are acting swiftly. They are afraid that I will ring them up and nag them.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Is that an official term?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Pretty much. We are up to 15, which is the official maximum. Of those, four are permanent, including Mr. McGarry. One of the appointments was a permanent appointee who is a marine biologist, which is a great skill set given where we are going with climate functions. There will need to be 11 interim members replaced in due course. I understand the Department is working towards that approach, replacing chair and replacing the interim members. They will have to put in place those structures in the place in the autumn because a year goes by very quickly.

An Cathaoirleach

How can a good staggered process be ensured so we do not lose people? Have they indicated they may stay on more than one year? Will any become more permanent positions as they become more experienced?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I would hope that some of them are very much enjoying the job and that some would decide it is something they want to do long term. They are an excellent group of people. Mr. McGarry has spent a lot of time training them up. It would be great but it is, however, a matter for the Department. All we can do is pester and get the Department to push that along.

An Cathaoirleach

Under the current legislation, 15 members is the maximum. Does the Minister still have scope to appoint more?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes, subject to Oireachtas consent, as I understand it.

An Cathaoirleach

If there are 15 on the board, a three-member quorum could operate. I am aware that for certain decisions there has to be a quorum higher than three. Is that correct for larger-scale plans?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is not mandatory but, in practice, for difficult decisions or decisions that are very substantial in their impact, I seek to have all available board members present. In due course, we will probably move to a five-board member model for certain major decisions. It is one of the recommendations in the report by the OPR. It just is not in our gift at the moment.

There is also a strategic infrastructure board, comprised of myself, Mr. McGarry, and three others. Unfortunately, I now have a conflict so I cannot take any strategic infrastructure decisions. It is just the four other members who can take those decisions at the moment. It is just a little bit tricky. What we must try to achieve is four board meetings daily, achieving six to eight decisions at each board meeting. If we are to hit our numbers that is what we really need to do.

An Cathaoirleach

How long would the board have to hit that target given the backlog needs to be worked through?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is effectively what we did last week. We had four board meetings running currently and we did it twice a day last week, which was a real blitz. Obviously we cannot do that every week because we must have time to read the files, and we could not do that with the bigger files, which can be huge. I have two enormous sets of boxes in my office that I am trying to plough my way through. We also need time to write up the decisions.

An Cathaoirleach

Sure, and we would not encourage that where we want timely decisions as well.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes, we want good decisions too. We believe there is a physical limit on how many decisions someone can take in a morning or an afternoon.

An Cathaoirleach

Absolutely. That is fine. The question I am toying with in my mind is whether the Minister has the capability to appoint more inspectors. Would that naturally mean we would get to where we want to be quicker in the context of the timeliness of decisions?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is decision makers rather than inspectors. We do have sanction to recruit inspectors. It potentially would, yes. To be fair to the Minister, I have not asked him to do so but it is certainly something I will consider. We want to see what we can extract from the current complement of decision makers first before we go back and say that we actually need more.

An Cathaoirleach

Yes, to test it out for the moment to see how the board gets on.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Exactly.

An Cathaoirleach

If we come to the next layer after the board decision makers, we come to the inspectors and those who work with the inspectors. What is the ideal complement of inspectors? Are they permanent members of staff or does the board bring in people as necessary?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

They are permanent members of staff, and we also have fee-per-case inspectors who are surge capacity. In general these are retired board inspectors. The average complement of inspectors is one third of the overall staffing of the board. We are currently at approximately 74. Over the next few months we are aiming to get to above 100 to 110. As we recruit inspectors we must also consider that we have a big digitisation need and we need more people in that space, we need more managers and we need people in HR. The organisation must grow around that as well.

An Cathaoirleach

I was about to mention the website but I am aware that Senator Boyhan has a particular interest in e-planning and the website and I will probably leave that to him.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We also need to recruit more technical skills. We currently have a competition for marine ecologists. It is those kinds of additional skill sets we will need to bring in to assist the broader inspectorate in their role. As I have mentioned, we have hired a head of legal services, who is in situ and doing a great job. We have sanction for an extra legal researcher in there but we will probably need more as well.

An Cathaoirleach

On the qualifications that a person needs to be an inspector, someone does not necessarily need to be a planner. They could be marine ecologists, engineers, architects and so on. Can they be qualified for the positions as well when the board advertises for an inspector?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Generally, a lot of the people we recruit have done a previous qualification such as engineering or architecture and then will have retrained into planning. That is a traditional route but perhaps Mr. McGarry will speak to that.

Mr. Chris McGarry

The inspectors would have a planning qualification and many will have another qualification on top of that as well. They may have come from sociology, geography, engineering or anything We have a good mix but, fundamentally, they are planners for the purposes of that job. We have, for example, an in-house ecologist who would not do an individual case on her own but is a very important facilitator to our colleagues in the inspectorate. As Ms Buckley said, we need to broaden that specialist knowledge and for the person to be more of a facilitator rather than directly doing the files alone.

An Cathaoirleach

One of the recommendations in the OPR's report is to rotate board members so the cases are mixed among them. Does An Bord Pleanála follow suit with the inspectors as well? Did this recommendation filter down to that too?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is an interesting question. We are rotating board members very actively, and this is done by the in-house team. We have divided the inspectorate into two specific streams. One deals with direct applications and one deals with appeals, including the large-scale residential development appeals, so there has been quite a bit of movement already in the inspectorate as we rotate people through those areas. We have tended not to put in directly recruited inspectors. We require our planning inspectors at the moment to have a minimum of five years' experience before they join us and they tend to come from the public and private sector. There is a lot of pain being felt by planning authorities across the country at the moment because we are in recruitment mode. We intend to introduce good mobility across the inspectorate, which is a HR function, in order that people do not feel they get stuck in a place and that they would get a chance to move around the system and deal with different types of files, and so they can stay fresh.

There is a big concern across the system regarding whether we have enough planners in this country. On foot of this, the Department has been talking to us about whether the board could help in the process of improving the output of the universities and one suggestion is to have guaranteed employment. We have started discussions with Technological University Dublin about whether we would introduce what would, effectively, be an apprenticeship scheme in An Bord Pleanála. This would be novel for us.

We think that could potentially be a win-win for the board and indeed for the planning system in its entirety. The board recruits a lot of staff from the north-east inner city and we could potentially start to put some of our own staff through that apprenticeship system. Some of them are bright as buttons and would have no problem dealing with a planning file. There could potentially be a win for that community as well, which would be great.

An Cathaoirleach

That is really interesting. Like any good apprenticeship, people should get to dip in and out of various aspects of it. Part of that apprenticeship could also involve serving some time with the local authority, with the board or maybe even some private stuff as well, so people get a good mix of things.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

One of the issues is around the guarantee of employment. We have not quite worked out that system yet, although I worked on a similar arrangement looking at apprentices when I was in the WRC for industrial relations experts. Like that, they rotated around the system. One of the things we would have to be very careful about with the private sector is conflict.

An Cathaoirleach

Of course. I call Senator Boyhan.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I welcome Ms Buckley. We go back a long time, I think over 20 years. We looked at the previous development plan when I was a councillor in Dún Laoghaire. That is a long time ago. First, I congratulate her on her work to date and second, I wish her well. She has been appointed by the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, as the new Secretary General of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. That is another major challenge for the nation, so I wish her well. That is in September. It is a very short timeframe that she has been at the board. As someone who has observed Ms Buckley, read about her and spoken to people who know her very well, I think she has been an amazing breath of fresh air. Her clarity today and when she was previously before the committee is clear. It is genuinely exemplary in terms of engagement with the committee. There is no floweriness about her. She is direct and that is good. She is concise and detailed in her responses. The board has been in a good place and you can see that, read about it and hear about it. I happen to know people who work at the board, who would not discuss anything with me but I know they are happy. That says something about the place.

I just want to ask a few questions. I will give Ms Buckley the questions all together and maybe she can answer as best she can. One of the biggest concerns coming into here today, and what the public want to hear about, is the 27,000 houses in the system. That is the narrative out there. I did a media check on a number of publications today with regard to An Bord Pleanála and the recurring theme is this figure of 27,000 housing units. Let us not call them all houses. We have a housing crisis in this country. The implications are for the builders and the investors, the people who put their money where their mouths are and who want to go. The builders tell me they are nearly going bust because they have no cash flow, they have no developments and they have had to lay people off. The smaller people who have made applications are waiting a long time. There is a big concern about the 27,000 homes stuck in the planning process. The figures may not be fully 27,000 but Ms Buckley knows what I am saying.

Does the board have sufficient funding for its decision-makers and enough resources in place? Ms Buckley touched on that so she need not go over it again but it is important that the board has the resources in place to meet its statutory timelines. I read Ms Buckley's engagement with the Committee of Public Accounts and she told it there was provision for the doubling of the staff to 300. Where are we in relation to that 300? She used the word "provision". I would like to see a timeline for the recruitment of these 300 people and what categories it is intended to employ them in. When will the board have the full complement of 300? Clearly it is way off that from what Ms Buckley has said today. She is talking about a couple here and a couple there but she told the Committee of Public Accounts that there is provision for 300. I would like Ms Buckley to touch on that.

Ms Buckley touched on the ecologists, which I was about to ask about. That is great. The marine biologists are fantastic too. That is great.

Everyone in the country knows An Bord Pleanála was mired in turmoil in the last year. Ms Buckley will be aware of the two reports by the planning regulator, Niall Cussen. She would be aware of the big gap in the institution's code of conduct. I commend her, because we got her code of conduct yesterday or the day before. It was sent to us. That is progress. A lot of organisations outside of An Bord Pleanála could look at that. In his second report, the regulator found that there is crisis of public and political confidence. Not only is there a lack of public confidence in the board, although to be fair, I think that is rapidly changing, there is a lack of political confidence in it. That was of course followed on by the internal crisis. That was all echoed by the independent Planning Regulator and not by me, but I so happen to concur with him.

I am conscious of my time so I am going to wrap up. The big issue before the board now is this. It was suggested to Ms Buckley at the Committee of Public Accounts that she might consider a corporate apology on behalf of An Bord Pleanála, following a series of scandals that engulfed the organisation and which in turn had a huge impact on the morale of her staff. She did not answer that question directly and say she would do such a thing. Now she has time to reflect on that but she may still not have an answer. She might feel it is not appropriate for her to do so; I do not know.

In response to Deputy Gould, Ms Buckley mentioned that the legal costs that arose in 2022 were in excess of €9 million. She said that was split 50:50 and that the real issue was that the board had conceded or lost cases and that incurred half of that €9 million. There are outstanding issues on account. There are a lot of lawyers - I am not here to promote them - and legal people expecting to be paid out by the board. Can Ms Buckley share that figure? I have an idea of what it might be but she might be able to share with the committee the significant outstanding figure that is on the board's books as a debt it owes in legal costs for cases.

Again, I wish Ms Buckley well and thank her for her great clarity and messaging. It is noticeable and it is fantastic to work with somebody like her.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I thank the Senator. That was very kind of him. I do not know if there are 27,000 houses sitting on the books of An Bord Pleanála or indeed in the planning system. What I can tell the Senator is that the board has granted planning permission for more than 10,000 housing units so far this year. We have refused a substantial number as well. Do not get me wrong; we are not a machine to grant planning permission for houses. We grant the ones we feel are necessary or appropriate to grant. We have about 76 SHD cases still sitting on our books, nearly 30 of which we can report on and we will be able to deal with them. However, there is a legal difficulty with between 40 and 50 of them. We sat down with our lawyers last week to see if we can work through a solution to that legal difficulty. We think we may have a possible regulatory solution and we will be talking to the Department about doing that. That would help us enormously to move those files through the system and get shot of them by the end of the year.

On our LRD cases, we are keeping on top of the 16-week timeline. We have only had to pay one fine so far and we are probably going to incur another one but broadly speaking, we are taking those decisions in a timely fashion and we are meeting our timeframes on those. The engine is working again. It has taken some time and that was to do with the fact that we just did not have enough decision-makers and we do now.

The Senator asked if we have sufficient resources. We are recruiting people as fast as we can. We recruit directly. We are up to 221, as I said. Obviously some people have left as well so we have to fill vacancies also. What I said at the Committee of Public Accounts is that we are aiming to be up to that number of 313 by the end of the year. We will hopefully get there. We are recruiting in a very tight labour market and we are trying to do that as quickly as we can. My colleague has just told me that we will have 15 more planners by the end of September.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I am just conscious that I have run out of time. Ms Buckley might touch on the matter of a corporate apology.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I beg your pardon. I thank the Senator for saying that. In fact, I put a corporate apology up on the An Bord Pleanála website a couple of months ago, after my Committee of Public Accounts appearance. I am happy to repeat it here today. Obviously An Bord Pleanála is extremely sorry to the people who deserved a better service over the last two years. The staff have taken it in the neck and I am very sorry to them also because they have had to deal with the front line and people being very upset. I am certainly very happy to repeat, on behalf of An Bord Pleanála, that we are extremely sorry to the members of the public who deserved a better service from this organisation.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Thank you.

An Cathaoirleach

It is important to mention that there are a lot of good people working throughout the planning system up and down the country. They often come under a huge spotlight.

I know there are good people working there.

Senator Mark Wall

I too welcome the witnesses. I want to start by talking about the future. I associate myself with previous words and wish Ms Buckley well in her new job. Will Ms Buckley talk us through the transition, given the work she has done to get An Bord Pleanála back up and get the engine running again? I know she mentioned something to the Chair about what will happen in September. Has there been any word about who will replace her? It is important that the engine keeps turning and ticking over, for all the reasons mentioned by colleagues today. Will she kick off with that?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is obviously a matter for the Minister, but I was very concerned. Morale in the board has improved significantly over the past few months. I knew people would get a shock when this announcement came out. I have been working with the Department on a smooth transition. They have started the process of recruiting a permanent chairperson, but by their nature those types of recruitments take a number of months. My understanding is that they are likely to appoint a further interim chairperson, and have that transition move extremely smoothly. I will not be stepping down until 1 September in any case. There is an unusually long lag because a Secretary General normally starts straight away. People were conscious of that on this occasion just to make sure. An organisation, which has been through the difficulty the board has been through over the past year is still fragile. It needs to ensure that. I am also delighted the Minister made an early decision to reappoint Mr. McGarry as deputy chair. That also allows for that smooth transition, which is great. We are working hard with the Department to try to achieve that.

Senator Mark Wall

That is positive and I thank Ms Buckley for her reply. I will concentrate most on what I need information about today, which is large-scale residential developments. They are relatively new. Ms Buckley has mentioned that An Bord Pleanála has had to pay one fine. Will Ms Buckley talk us through the procedure for large-scale residential developments? They have obviously taken over from strategic housing developments, SHDs. As public representatives we are hearing more and more about them. I am from County Kildare and I have dealt with a number of them in the past weeks. I want to get what it means for large-scale residential developments, the 16 week process and the fine. How much was the fine, and what is the fine the board has paid at this stage?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We have received 22 large-scale residential developments. There are 14 currently on hand. We have received fewer of them than we anticipated, which is the first interesting point. These go to the local authority in the first instance and are dealt with there. They only come to the board on appeal. We have paid out one fine of €10,000, which is the same as for SHDs. The normal process is that when they arrive, they are sent through our processing system extremely quickly and land on the inspectorate desk as soon as possible, They then have eight weeks to write up a report about them. Because these developments have generally been through the local authority system, they are more cooked, if I can put it that way. There is more or less a klaxon when one arrives on the floor for decision with us. Mr. McGarry works with the administrative officer who is in charge of allocation of files to make sure it is all done at arm's length. They work very closely to make sure they go straight on to the desk of a board member, and are taken within that time. We are conscious of the timelines to do that.

You could say it is doable as a process, as long as you commit the resources to it and have the resources to do it. It is doable in particular because the numbers so far have been relatively small.

Senator Mark Wall

I will go back to SHDs. Ms Buckley mentioned there were between 40 and 50 waiting for decisions. Have fines been paid in respect of those SHDs?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There were 76 for decision and every one of them has had a fine paid.

Senator Mark Wall

I have read a few inspectors' reports and have been involved in a few of them in communities. Do we know how many inspectors' reports have been overturned by the board in a final decision. Does Ms Buckley have that information?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I do indeed. A remarkably consistent 89% of inspectors' reports are upheld by the board when they come to that. That statistic has been identical for the past two years, which is unusual. Roughly between 10% and 11% get overturned at board level. I have sat in on a number of board decisions myself, and sometimes the calls are marginal. Planning is a discretionary issue. I have recently overturned an inspectorate and a local authority refusal for a one-off rural house. We felt the person had supplied enough evidence to show they were farming, and intended to continue farming, so we granted planning permission. It can go both ways, if the Senator sees what I mean.

Senator Mark Wall

Okay, and that feeds into the question on judicial reviews. Has the board learned lessons over the past years on what I think she said was the decrease in the number of judicial reviews? Ms Buckley also mentioned that as regards housing they were for a variety of reasons. Is the board reviewing judicial reviews and learning lessons from them to reduce the amount of money mentioned to Deputy Gould?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I have consistently been saying that the board has to become a learning organisation. We needed to recruit a head of legal services to help us learn the law. His name is Kevin Baneham, and one of his core roles is to develop a litigation strategy so we are more intelligent about how we handle our judicial review load. It is going to keep coming. There are no two ways about it. His second role is to help us adapt more quickly to changes in the legal environment whether they come through legislation, new policies or through precedent-setting decisions by the courts. There have been some novel decisions from the courts in the past few years, which have reshaped how planning decisions have to be taken. Mr. Baneham has hit the ground running. Some of the court decisions are between 300 and 400 pages long. He has given us some synopses, which are a model of clarity. I am delighted with him and I think he is going to be a great asset to the board. He will help relieve the burden, because people were completely swamped with judicial reviews, and we needed to improve the capacity of the organisation to handle that caseload.

An Cathaoirleach

The planning regulator just issued a good explainer on the large-scale residential developments, LRDs, too.

Deputy Emer Higgins

I thank the witnesses for being here. We all know the reputational damage that has been done to An Bord Pleanála. I acknowledge the apology today, and also the one on their website in recent months. I hope they go some way towards repairing trust and boosting morale. It is great to hear that morale has already significantly improved in An Bord Pleanála. I hope I interpreted this right. Ms Buckley gave a really interesting statistic that 89% of local authority decisions are upheld by An Bord Pleanála.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

No. An Bord Pleanála inspectors' recommendations are agreed with by the board when it comes to final decision.

Deputy Emer Higgins

I understand. That makes sense. Does Ms Buckley have a percentage for how many local authority decisions are upheld by An Bord Pleanála?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Not yet. It is worth bearing in mind that we get appeals. By definition somebody is unhappy with the decision of the local authority. I think it is normally about 50:50. I cannot remember the statistic, but Ms Hill will get it.

Mr. Chris McGarry

It varies from local authority.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes, it varies from local authority to local authority. That is a good point.

Deputy Emer Higgins

That is interesting. It would be really interesting to get a breakdown of that percentage by local authority, if that were possible.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Can we come back to the committee with that information? We would be happy to do that.

Deputy Emer Higgins

It would be very interesting if that could be shared. I know from the opening statement there are approximately 3,400 cases with An Bord Pleanála at the moment, and 275 of those are for larger infrastructural projects. I am looking for the figure as to how many homes, and how many roads that is. I believe it is 27,000.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Is that of the 275?

Deputy Emer Higgins

Yes.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Those are major infrastructural projects. They are not houses as such. They are roads, rail, wind farms and electricity transmitters, etc. We can certainly get a description of how many are roads projects, or are under the roads Act, if that is appropriate.

Deputy Emer Higgins

That would be really helpful.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That would also include BusConnects of course.

Deputy Emer Higgins

That is fine. Is the figure of 27,000 homes correct, in terms of the 3,400 cases and what that translates to?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We do not have an estimate. It is worth bearing in mind that encompasses SHDs and LRDs, but a lot of normal planning appeals have smaller housing developments. They might be 30, 40 or 50 units. There would be a lot in there as well.

Deputy Emer Higgins

The blitz has been done on the less complicated ones. Is there any way of looking at increasing the decisions on the larger and more complex files apart from recruitment, which I understand is ongoing given that the board has the provision for 300 in place?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It cannot be done that way. When I have been giving talks about the work of the board, for example, to other public servants, I have a little trick. I have a visual aid behind me of a file and I get the lads to go in and I say just pick me a file on a standard wind farm or whatever. Generally speaking, there will be two or three banker's boxes of documents, a file several cm. thick of paperwork and a 200 page report by an inspector. That takes days to read as a board member. Then the board member comes in and presents at the three person case about the detail of it. The decisions can be reasonably straightforward, particularly because the analysis done by the inspectorate is so good in general terms. However, we still have to be very careful with every single one of those, particularly if there are a lot of objectors. There will be somebody who will look to our ruling and question the reasons and considerations and whether we have missed a trick in any regard. My point is that the process needs time. Physically, human beings cannot work at that pace on those big files.

Deputy Emer Higgins

I want to look at the resources and the workload that the board currently has. I know from Ms Buckley's statement that the 600 appeals on residential zoned land taxes account for 16% of the workload. This is brand new, really, for the board, at a time when existing resources are under huge pressure. The board is recruiting to try to increase its workforce but in the meantime, the workload is increasing by 16%. None of that has anything to do with building homes. Is An Bord Pleanála the appropriate body to be looking at this? I can feel my chief executive curling when I say this but should this be going back to local authorities? Is this in the appropriate home? A workload increase of 16% is a dramatic one at a time when we know that up to 27,000 homes are not being delivered in the middle of a housing crisis because the board is already under such workload pressures.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I am going to be good and say that it was a policy matter, not a matter for An Bord Pleanála. However, as one can imagine, the air was blue above the building on Marlborough Street in that week when I realised just how many appeals were going to land. It was not anticipated that the figure would be that high. Hopefully it will never rise to those numbers again. I should also say that there is quite a net decision that the board has to take. The reports are quite short and the decisions are quite quick. We have already started to take them. We are taking about 30 per week, as it stands. We do them at the beginning or end of meetings.

Deputy Emer Higgins

It is still two years' worth of work.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

No, we will get most of them done in six months. There is a further round of appeals due to land in September.

Deputy Emer Higgins

Is expertise required by the staff to make decisions on these or would people who are not as expert be equipped to be able to make decisions, if this was to be redirected elsewhere?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is an extremely good question. I asked myself that very question. I asked the team if we could hire a load of barristers and give them the files and let them make the decisions. We ran a few test cases and we determined that the quickest way to do it was with the the people who are used to looking at whether land is serviced or serviceable quickly and whether it is zoned. Those are the two net questions that the board has to answer. I was convinced, reluctantly, that our inspectorate could do them quite quickly and that they would be decisions appropriate to be done by an inspector reporting up to a board member. However, as a policy decision, those appeals could have been sent in a different direction.

Deputy Emer Higgins

It was 30 per week, not 30 per month?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Thirty per week is what we are aiming for.

Deputy Emer Higgins

I thank Ms Buckley for her responses and wish her the best of luck in her new role.

An Cathaoirleach

The question on the local authority decisions versus these being upheld by An Bord Pleanála is reported somewhere. I think it might be NOAC or the OPR

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We do it in our annual report. I am giving a sneak preview here. What is going to be in the 2022 annual report is that it is bang on 89%, as it was in 2021.

An Cathaoirleach

In that case, 89% of decisions made by local authorities are-----

Ms Oonagh Buckley

No, 89% for the inspectors. We also report the local authority overturn rate.

An Cathaoirleach

I think it is already reported.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We always look at the overturn rate for inspectors. That is the one we focus on.

Deputy Thomas Gould

How many judicial reviews did An Bord Pleanála lose last year and so far this year? The second part of the question is, how many judicial reviews did An Bord Pleanála concede last year and so far this year? The third part of the question is, what measures have been put in place to reduce the number of losses or concessions?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

My colleague is looking for the figures for 2023. In 2022 there were 95 applications for judicial review, and then there were 20 substantive court rulings delivered last year. Of those rulings, 11 upheld the decision of the board and nine struck it down. It is worth bearing in mind that in any particular case, there could be any number of issues raised in the pleadings. The board has to win on them all, if it is to win a court ruling. We conceded 35 and 14 cases were withdrawn by the applicants.

Cases are conceded for a number of reasons, in my experience. I have to take the decision in An Bord Pleanála at the moment to concede a case in court to our internal rules. Sometimes it is because the board has made a mistake. It can be a mistake as basic as a prescribed body having made a submission, and it was missed, not included in the paperwork that went to the inspector and therefore not considered by the board when making a decision. We would have to take the decision again. That has happened in at least one case that I have conceded

On a number of occasions, it has been because the board made its decision on the basis of, say, a policy consideration that it understood to be correct at the time, but in the meantime, there has been a High Court decision stating that the board was incorrect in the way it applied the rules. Therefore, any other case that raises that issue where the board made the decision in same way, we have to concede because there is no point fighting the issue again.

The classic issue where this has arisen is regarding sunlight and daylight rules in apartments. The rules were being applied, I think, by the entire planning system one way and the High Court has determined that it was incorrect to do so and the rules should have been applied in a different way.

A number of cases are being conceded because we are getting advice to the effect that previous board decisions were insufficiently reasoned out. We have not dealt with every issue, or we have not dealt with an issue that was important to a person who made an objection or a submission on that consideration. That has occurred on occasion.

In some instances, we have conceded cases on the grounds of possible objective bias involving parties to the case and the person who made the decision in the case. That is the broad range of instances where we have had to make concessions, in my experience, in the last six months.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I thank Ms Buckley for the very detailed reply. Were decisions or mistakes made because of the pressure the board was under due to the staffing issues? The caseload was mentioned earlier. There must have been tremendous pressure at the time when coming to some of these decisions and then being involved in the judicial review and having the case made. Did the board have the resources and the staffing to fight these cases? Was that one of the factors?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I think one of the important factors was the absence of an in-house lawyer to consult. With a tricky legal or policy issue, we need to make sure we are doing things correctly. We need to ensure that our reasons correctly deal with the issue. There was no one on hand to ask whether we were doing things right or not.

That is one of the issues that I was keen to progress. As I say, a head of legal services is starting.

Where matters were missed at inspectorate level, it may well have been the pressure of work as well. Obviously, there was a large caseload and a reducing number of decision makers over the course of 2022. They came under increasing pressure, as I am sure Mr. McGarry would agree, to try to take as many decisions as possible as well as possible. It was, however, a combination of factors. Some of the decisions would not have been regarded as wrong at all when they were taken but suddenly became wrong ex post facto, if the Deputy sees what I mean.

Deputy Thomas Gould

They became wrong in the process. In her submission, Ms Buckley outlined that there are currently 3,400 cases on hand with the board awaiting analysis or a decision. Final discharges from inspectors have been received in 1,100 cases which now await decisions of the board. Ms Buckley outlined what has been done to try to get through as many cases as possible. Tremendous work has been done to catch up with the backlog. I am not here to apportion blame and I know Ms Buckley and her colleagues are trying to manage and fix a problem not of their making. An Educate Together school in Douglas in Cork is waiting for a decision. It will possibly have hundreds of pupils. All the school is looking for is a decision. Other people have contacted me, including a builder who wants to build 30 or 40 houses. He is not looking for me to make representations. He is just looking for a decision or timeline. I remember speaking to one person recently about a derelict site in the heart of my community which I have been giving out about to the council. It is dragging down the whole area as a source of anti-social behaviour and dumping. This person has submitted a planning application for the site but he has said that at this stage the property is unviable. Even if he gets a decision, he will have been waiting so long that the increased costs of construction mean the project could be dead in the water.

An Cathaoirleach

I ask members not to mention live files that are before the board, a local authority or the courts. They can speak in general terms but-----

Deputy Thomas Gould

I am speaking in general terms. This goes back to the point made earlier. People need to have a timeline for when a decision will be made, whether it is positive or negative. If we look at the number of cases, of the 3,400 cases, there are 1,100 with inspectors' reports. If they could be processed soon, it would be a huge amount of work. What is the breakdown of the remaining 2,300 cases? Are they for one-off housing, housing developments or extensions? What is the timeline for completing those 2,300 cases? Will they all be cleared within 12 months? Is that an unrealistic timeline?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I thank the Cathaoirleach as I would have had to declare a conflict. As I am from Douglas, I could not possibly talk about an Educate Together school in the area. Did I forget to mention I was from Cork?

The first thing to say is that people are not getting the service from An Bord Pleanála they deserve. I will be clear about that. We need to get back into the space where they are getting that service. However, An Bord Pleanála has been in this position before, and has recovered. In 2017, SOP compliance fell to below 40% and was brought back. As late as the end of 2021, the board had roughly 1,100 or 1,200 files on hand. That is approximately SOP delivery timeline. It can and will be done. Mr. McGarry and I are determined to deliver that.

Deputy Gould asked about the breakdown. One of the really good things we have been able to work on in dealing with this is that I have a task force working on the backlog. We have great data around that, which we have pulled from our systems. Of the 1,700 files that are with the inspectorate, approximately 450 relate to residential zoned land tax. That is quite a net issue and that ball should go through the system quickly. We aim to clear those quickly. Of the others, approximately 1,200 are normal planning appeals, as they are called. They are everything from a dormer window, a kitchen extension, all the way up to Educate Together schools, major employers and so on. It is a mixed bag. Generally speaking, though, we can expect about two thirds of those to be either what are called householder cases, that is, very small cases, or slightly more mid-range cases. We are allocating them to inspectors quickly. Many of those are being allocated to the fee-per-case inspectors because doing those files is well within their capability. The other, bigger ones will work through the system in the normal course but they are real mix and gathering of cases relating, for example, to disability access services, compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, and amendments.

To people who had the misfortune to have to appeal to An Bord Pleanála or have their development appealed to An Bord Pleanála last year, I can say that I am very sorry. They really got caught into a mess not of their own making but we are trying to get back as quickly as possible to some sort of standard where people get the service they deserve from the board.

Deputy Thomas Gould

When will the 3,400 live cases be cleared?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I have said today and previously that the goal is to get back to a standard operating on-hands number, which would be between 1,200 and 1,400, ideally by the end of the year. It may go a little bit into the new year. However, that is reliant on the board being resourced at decision-making level and being able to recruit the people it needs to deliver on that. As long as those resources are put in place, the board should be able to deliver on that and be back to where it should be by then, in other words, at 18 weeks, although the statutory operating procedure is not 18 weeks for all of them. That is the goal and we are working very hard to get there.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I will come back to Ms Buckley on a few of the matters I raised earlier. She responded with a different figure than I had suggested. We are told that 27,000 homes are stuck in the system. I looked at a number of press clippings in the Oireachtas Library and online. Remember the mayhem we heard about today. The consistent story the press is running is that the figure is approximately 27,000, although it may drop by 1,000 or 2,000. Can Ms Buckley she shed light on the number of housing units caught up in the system in the board this week?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

No, I cannot.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Would it be 14,000? Would it be 20,000?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is an external estimate that somebody has literally gone through appeals before the board, probably the sustainable housing developments, SHDs, most likely. It is also worth pointing out that those figures will change on a daily and weekly basis.

Senator Victor Boyhan

What was the last check or last call on it?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We do not do that kind of count.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is okay. I just wanted to clarify that. I am here to tease out some of the issues and I know Ms Buckley is happy to engage. I respect that. The figure in the public domain is 27,000. In the past six months in which Ms Buckley has been heading up this organisation, surely she would have asked whether that is the case and asked her officials to do a random trawl to get a sense of this. Let us not forget that we have a housing crisis. I am surprised the Minister has not been on to Ms Buckley, or maybe he has, to say he is being told, week in and week out, that thousands of houses are stuck in the system and to ask what Ms Buckley is doing about it. She knows where I am coming from. We have a housing crisis. The public wants houses, end of story, and developers want to build houses. Money and capital are being lost or tied up or loans or commitments for finance are being lost and falling away. I do not want to say too much other than to ask for a ballpark figure. In the past six months, surely Ms Buckley has asked for some sort of check on the volume of housing units stuck in the system.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I thank the Senator for raising that point because this is actually an important philosophical moment. It is important that An Bord Pleanála says what it is about.

We are not about delivering housing units; we are about taking proper planning decisions. It may be that every single one of those 27,000 units will have to be refused on proper planning grounds. I just wanted to state that first so that the Senator understands that it is not the board’s job to be a delivery engine for housing. It is the board’s job to take good planning decisions that are right for the future of the country.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is a profound statement.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is a pretty profound statement. It is important. There have been some philosophical debates within the board because as people have arrived, we have asked things like why we do not yet in our annual report state that we granted planning permission for a certain number of units. There is a strong view within An Bord Pleanála that we have to be seen to be fair and equal. Everybody has an opportunity to contribute to the sorts of decisions that we take and we have to achieve a balance between all of those people. Notwithstanding that, I have the figure of how many units we have granted and how many we have refused so far this year, if the Senator would like to hear that.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Ms Buckley told us 12,000 were granted this year - I noted that already. I am trying to get how many are in the system but, to be fair to Ms Buckley, as she is always frank, straight and upfront, she is not in a position to tell us.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

No.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I am somewhat disappointed by that but we will park that there. We will move on then to the 300 staff. Ms Buckley told the Committee of Public Accounts that she had the permission to double her staff. Is she allowed to appoint all of those or is that on an ongoing approval basis? If she had the resources in place, could she rapidly recruit 300 people?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

First, it is a 50% increase in staff – we were at 200 at the beginning of the year. We are recruiting. We have sanction to recruit them. There is a further process that has to be gone through with the Department but that is under way. We are recruiting them as fast as we can. The goal, as always, has been to recruit them by the end of the year.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is great. I refer to the name “An Bord Pleanála”. There was an in-house discussion about it – as attributed by the press. I cannot say what happened in-house but it was well documented. We as a committee have a particular view and I think we have expressed that. What is Ms Buckley’s view? Would she be supportive of the staff’s view? It is a simple thing, but simple things matter. I think it is a good, strong brand. I agree with Ms Buckley that it is on an upward trajectory again. It is held in high esteem. I hold it in high esteem and I have been around planning for a long time. What is Ms Buckley’s view in simple terms? Would she be supportive of retaining the name “An Bord Pleanála”? It is only semantics, some people have suggested, to change the name to something else.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is policy decision by the Minister as to what he wants to do.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I know that.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

However, it is a strongly held view by many members of staff that they would like to keep the name.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is all I wanted to hear. That is fantastic and I agree with it.

Going back to the legal costs, Ms Buckley talked about the 50:50 split and the cost of conceding and losing cases. She explained how the cases were conceded and said that there were many logistic, pragmatic reasons for that to happen. I understand all of that. There is a substantial outstanding debt on An Bord Pleanála’s books in respect of litigation and legal fees. Can Ms Buckley quantify that?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes. Sorry. Which figure am I looking at?

Ms Bríd Hill

The overall is €10 million non-recoverable costs.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Some €10 million of non-recoverable costs.

Ms Bríd Hill

No, non-recoverable cost is €4.6 million, sorry.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

At the end of last year, you are looking at about - sorry, that is non-recoverable costs, so that is where we have won. I think the best thing to do is to come back on it rather than us trying to work it out. It is very small type, by the way.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Okay, so many millions of euro are due.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Many millions are due.

Senator Victor Boyhan

Many millions are due on An Bord Pleanála's books for cases that it has conceded or lost, or legal costs generally. We will park that.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I should say that we probably will not be able to give the Senator an exact figure-----

Senator Victor Boyhan

I understand.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

-----because the taxation system-----

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is fair enough. It is just a ballpark figure.

In wrapping up, in the planning and development consolidation Act or new Act, call it what you like, there is a substantial section regarding An Bord Pleanála. That will not be delivered, of course, in Ms Buckley’s term. This Act will not be dealt with until the autumn. Does Ms Buckley have any particular issues with or comments on that or does she not want to comment on it?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I do not particularly want to comment on it.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is okay.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

More generally, we are working closely with the Department on the aspects of the Act that concern the board specifically. In fact, I am meeting Department officials tomorrow to go through the governance arrangements for An Bord Pleanála and to make sure that what they hope to achieve is reflected into the draft Bill when it is presented to the Oireachtas in the autumn.

Senator Victor Boyhan

That is fantastic.

Finally, on Monday, the Irish Planning Institute will be launching a survey of the planning profession for 2023. I am sure Ms Buckley is fully aware of all of that. I think there will be some learning in that. Regarding the apprenticeship, I think what Ms Buckley talked about is a very good model. We as a committee would be interested in hearing more because clearly there is a need for more planners. We need to get them in, cranked up and through the system, as well as other people who can move from other related or complementary professions with this added professional skill of planning. The board might keep us informed of its views. The area of training, further training and ongoing training in respect of planning is critical. I would love to see more young people going down that route. Some people learn at different paces, different levels and through experience. I think the apprenticeship model is good and I thank Ms Buckley for bringing that to the table.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Not at all. On a general note, while I do not want to commit my successor in any way, I think it would be useful for the board to come to the committee on a reasonably regular basis to update members on how things are going. That should be part of how we present ourselves in public as well.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I wish Ms Buckley well again.

An Cathaoirleach

I will take the next slot. Ms Buckley opened up an interesting discussion about housing numbers and delivery versus decisions made in the interests of sustainability and proper planning. I do not like to get the two confused. Following on that line of questioning regarding the planning Bill we have before us, Ms Buckley mentioned cases being quashed and remitted in judicial review cases. When a case is quashed and remitted back to the board, the entire process does not have to be started again, only the part that the error was found in.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes, the stage at which the error was made.

An Cathaoirleach

In the first draft of the planning Bill, one of the proposals was that there could be the ability to correct any error of law during or prior to a judicial review process. What is the difference between quashing and remitting, and correcting the error of law during the judicial review process?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is a question of time. To quash and remit, you need a full-scale decision. You have to go through a series of steps and you engage the processes of a judge. It is a policy decision and it is an interesting point about decision-makers. We had a similar request made about the International Protection Appeal Tribunal, IPAT, for example, and whether they should be able to correct things. Regarding an obvious error on the face of the record, the board is already able to correct minor errors and these would be more major errors. It would be a matter of time and cost to all sides as to whether that would help the board to fix a problem that it had not spotted.

An Cathaoirleach

I wish to expand on that a bit. I am not asking Ms Buckley to comment on policy because that is not the question I am putting to her. She also said that to give up on a case early is probably better.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes. Conceding it earlier saves everybody the costs.

An Cathaoirleach

When a judicial review is taken, one would be sort of aware of where it is going and the grounds for it. In a quash and remit, a judge has made a decision and sent it back. You have to correct that error and then you can start again. If you concede a case, you cannot go back, correct that error for the reason you are conceding it, and start again, can you? The applicant would have to.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

The concession, in essence, is that we go into the court and say “Quash it and remit it back to us and we will make the decision”. That is the concession, generally.

An Cathaoirleach

An early concession would lead to a quicker quash and remit, which means you could go back and correct that decision. We would then be compliant with the judicial review process and we might not necessarily need that. We might not necessarily need that correction of error of law then, which has proven to be quite controversial to many people. That would be my view.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is a question of policy as to whether one thinks it is a good approach. Because the board was not fully resourced in this area, it often was not taking those early quash and remit concession decisions.

The caseload was overwhelming. There is no question but that we needed all hands on deck even just to manage the stages of it. It is certainly a better idea overall, where an obvious error on the face of the record is spotted and it is brought to the board's attention by its lawyers or otherwise, that a quick decision is taken to concede it and get it back into the process so we can fix it from that point, whether that is in the inspector’s report, a processing error or, indeed, a board decision.

An Cathaoirleach

That is fine. I just wanted to check they are two similar things.

The marine planning unit is a real specialty and it is obviously going to become busier. We know we had four successful projects in the recent offshore auction and they will most likely be entering the planning process shortly. In terms of the resources to deal with marine planning, it is not all big offshore wind arrays and, under the Marine Area Planning Act, there are other aspects of marine work, such as ports, piers, telecoms cables and so on. How resourced are we to deal with that? I know what Ms Buckley is going to say with regard to resources but this is a specialty.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is quite a challenge and I would not want to underplay it. The challenges are even those specialties that are in Ireland. If they are in Ireland, many people already have conflicts because they have worked for the private developers. One of the things we have been doing, as well as recruiting people, is to send people on specialist marine planning courses and we will work on that and get some board members to do those as well, when the permanent members are appointed. Happily, one of the permanent members who has come in is a marine biologist and worked in the National Parks and Wildlife Service back in the day, so it is great to have him there. We have gone on an international specialism hunt. We have advertised across Europe and my team, including the director of marine planning and so forth, have been interviewing those people who have put their hands up to come in on those specialist areas.

Of course, given those big windfarm array cases are very large but are very small in number, the board is probably better off hiring in the skill sets for those, if I could put it that way. It is about trying to have the necessary skills at a time when every other agency in Ireland dealing with this area, whether the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority or otherwise, is trying to recruit from the same pool. At some point, although it probably will not be me, we will probably need to sit down and see whether there is any role for sharing skills across organisations but, again, only if that can be managed in a non-conflicted way. That is the difficulty.

An Cathaoirleach

Is there scope for sharing between different planning authorities, for example, with the Scottish planning authorities or authorities in other jurisdictions? I know it is not exactly the same legislation but the principles of proper planning in the marine area would still apply.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is worth exploring. Scotland is well ahead of us on this and Denmark likewise. I have just come away from a presentation by a Danish Minister and what they have done on offshore wind is very impressive.

An Cathaoirleach

There is the Netherlands as well.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We did try to go into that space in places such as Belgium and the Netherlands, where we knew the skills existed. That might be quite inventive, as the Chair said. Certainly, we have spent a lot of time reaching out to colleagues in Scotland to talk to them about their experiences.

An Cathaoirleach

If Ms Buckley does not have the figure for my last question, that is fine. Does An Bord Pleanála report on the number of vexatious cases that would be dismissed for that reason?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There are very few. Normally, cases that we dismiss are invalid cases rather than vexatious. Most people who do any class of appeal, whether in planning or not, can work up enough of a case not to be vexatious, if the Chair knows what I mean.

An Cathaoirleach

To clarify, if somebody puts in a submission to the local authority on a planning application, the fact they have made a submission gives them an opportunity to appeal that decision to An Bord Pleanála, whether it is based on sound planning principles or simply “I do not like the colour of the brickwork”, although that might be a valid reason. That application ends up in the board and ends up in that delayed process. After that, does the board ever take a view that it was a very unreasonable case? Is it just a small number of cases that are like this?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

In my experience, I have dealt with cases where I wonder why it is in the planning system at all, for example, widening gates to allow an electric car to be brought up to charge it, and the neighbours across the road appeal it and it gets stuck in An Bord Pleanála for 18 months. We cannot do very much for neighbourly feelings.

One of the things we have been talking to the Department about is whether there might be amendments. I have to go back to the Department on something that has been sitting on my desk in this regard, but whether there are amendments to the planning regulations to exempt things from planning completely is a question worth considering. For example, things like Velux windows or solar panels on the front of house roofs are not currently exempted from planning. We would be thinking about things like that. Many people are building up into their attic space because they cannot afford to move and they are expanding the space in their homes, yet they are ending up in the planning system because they are trying to put a Velux window on the front roof line. We would be saying to ourselves that that is something where perhaps, at this point, we need to modernise some of those exempted development requirements.

An Cathaoirleach

The board does not report on that. It would just adjudge it like other cases and it would not make the judgment to change that.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is a proper planning ground and, indeed, many of those would be refused by the planning authority, so it is a first-party appeal.

Senator John Cummins

In regard to the prioritisation of cases, Ms Buckley said that a number of the ones in the blitz that the board did were within the 18-week timeframe and they were not done in chronological order. On what basis is the board deciding those? Obviously, somebody who is waiting considerably longer might hear today that some cases are being dealt with within 18 weeks and could be rightly annoyed that one case was dealt with when that person's case was not. What is the methodology that the board is using to determine that prioritisation?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

First, large-scale residential developments, LRDs, are prioritised full stop because they are the subject of a fine if we do not do them within the 16 weeks. That is a mandatory prioritisation required by the legislation. When it comes to those smaller cases, we had a long conversation about this internally in An Bord Pleanála as to whether we would stick to strict chronology and just try to improve our output, but that everybody who came in through the doors of the board in the years from late 2021, through 2022 and the first half of 2023, would all not be dealt with within the statutory objective period, SOP. On the other hand, we could try to deal with this by coming at the problem from both ends, if I can put it that way, and trying to chronologically deal with the older cases as fast as we can, but, at the same time, for any cases that we managed to clear in sufficient time to make a decision within the SOP, we would do them as well. In other words, we would give some people using our services the service that they deserve.

I appreciate, and the staff in An Bord Pleanála could tell the Senator, that this enrages people and staff get really angry phone calls from people and they have to deal with that. I apologise to people who have ended up with appeals to An Bord Pleanála just at this absolute nadir of what the board’s capacity was, given the absolute problems the board went through last year and in the early part of this year. We will try to get to everybody. We will try to deal with all of this and get back to the SOP operational period as soon as possible. We will get to them but in order to try to give the right service to as many people as possible, we are going to have to change the priority in that way. However, most people will be dealt with chronologically because more than 60% of the files in the building are at this point out of SOP, so we will be dealing with them chronologically in that way.

Senator John Cummins

What is the file that has been on the desk for the longest?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There are a couple of substitute consents that are extremely complex legally, and I think the eldest one is probably about four years old. Although I will not mention the case, there is a specific case where, for specific legal reasons involving the habitats directive, it has been a very long time in the board, possibly longer than five years. However, there have been some developments on that particular file in recent times so we are moving on that file and it is now into a separate process called IROPI, or imperative reasons of overriding public interest, under the Natura directive.

Senator John Cummins

That is a legal one but with regard to the other case mentioned, four years is a long time.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It would only be a handful of cases. The substitute consent procedure is extremely complex and we could be here till midnight if I tried to explain it to the Senator. It relates to developments like quarries that if they started now, would be the subject of an environmental impact assessment, EIA, and have to go through an extremely complex process. Legal changes have been made in the past year or two that have affected the progress of those cases.

Senator John Cummins

Regarding the reason I asked the question about prioritisation, Ms Buckley referenced the LRDs being prioritised, which is fine. There are fines attaching to them. We had this discussion during pre-legislative scrutiny of the planning Bill where the question of imposing fines on An Bord Pleanála for not meeting statutory timelines was discussed at length. There seemed to a consensus that it may be counterproductive to impose fines on An Bord Pleanála. I was not of that view. I thought we should be imposing fines on it for not meeting timelines. From the responses given by Ms Buckley, correct me if I am wrong, it appears that An Bord Pleanála does respond to the threat of a fine at the end of it. Is this assessment wrong?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

What it means is that you have built an incentive into the system that absolute priority is given to a very small class of cases and they are put ahead of every other type of case looked at by the board. The suggestion in the Bill is that every case would be the subject of a fine. Again, this is absolutely a policy decision by the Minister but I said that in circumstances where at best, the board only ever really committed to dealing with 70% of cases within its SOP - and this was when it was fully resourced and fully capable of dealing with that - fines can create strange incentives for the people leading this organisation in the future. I felt and still feel that there may be other ways of holding the leadership of An Bord Pleanála to account for meeting its targets, rather than paying out taxpayers' money to do it.

Senator John Cummins

I accept what Ms Buckley is saying but when we hear there is a response to trying to meet those timelines when fines are a possibility, that is for the legislation that will be before us in the autumn. The Department did not set out those statutory timelines in the draft legislation before us. The Department stated on record that it was in consultation with An Bord Pleanála regarding what the board felt were manageable timelines for the various different elements before the board. Can Ms Buckley share the dialogue around that with us? What has An Bord Pleanála gone back to the Department with regarding what An Bord Pleanála thinks would be acceptable timelines? When I spoke on this, I noted it is all well and good but this legislation is for the next 20 years, so while we are encountering a backlog at the moment, we need to put ambitious timelines in place, not just timelines that recognise the backlog at the moment.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I am happy to share with the Senator what we went back to the Department with. I will predicate it by noting that when I appeared before the committee here in February, I stated there has to be an understanding that some cases are bigger and harder and take longer to read and that the material provided with them is enormous. They take longer. We went back to the Department with the following suggestion. Obviously, it is a matter for the Department to decide whether that is right. Moreover, at all times and in every communication of mine with the Department, it has been said that these suggested timelines are predicated on the board being fully resourced at all times to deliver this. Essentially, if the board is not resourced, it will not be able to do this. We suggested that 18 weeks is an appropriate timeline for the vast majority of cases. Where an EIA is submitted, we feel that 26 weeks is an appropriate timeline. For major infrastructure developments, we felt a year was an appropriate timeline. I think the Department has a slight issue with that but we are working our way through that. We have suggested that there should be a "stop the clock" function, which does arise at local authority level, so if we go out for further information, the clock stops and we only starting counting the clock again when further information is submitted and will then have a certain period of eight weeks or longer depending on the size of application involved after that further information, FI, is submitted.

We think that based on its anticipated work load, a properly resourced An Bord Pleanála should be able to manage all of that. However, we get things like surges of cases. A total of 600 appeals landed on us in a single week in May on the residential zoned land tax, so those sort of things must also be encompassed on what is predictable and what is done in terms of the timelines. My concern about fines is that depending on its resourcing, the board has gone through peaks and troughs of hitting its SOP. In 2017, it was below where we are now. You would be putting the taxpayer at hazard to the payment of a very large amount of fines where no incentives would be able to deliver on the part of the management and the organisation would not be able to deliver on timelines like those because of external events or lack of resources.

Senator John Cummins

What is frustrating for the public regarding decisions made by An Bord Pleanála, and I am not referring to any specific cases but will keep it very general, relates to where a decision is contrary to the development plan as set down. A local authority might have a wind energy policy with exclusion zones for sites for wind farms. An application is made directly to An Bord Pleanála and something is granted, even though the development plan the councillors and everyone else fed into over two or three years says it should be an area where wind farms are not applicable. How is that squared? How does one explain that to the local authority, the councillors and the public that are subject to such a decision?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is a very good question. It is one of the great conundrums of how the planning system delivers. Wind farms constitute a great example because we have overriding climate change plans and a very strong agenda in that space where the local development plan may have put in rules that are contrary to the national ambition. Generally speaking, An Bord Pleanála is bound by the local development plan. However, there is a provision in the Act that permits An Bord Pleanála in certain circumstances to grant a development in material contravention of the development plan. Where the planning authority has refused on that ground, the board can only do so in certain limited circumstances. It is a function that is exercised very sparingly by the board.

At the same time, it is a very big challenge. in that development plans are adopted once every six years and where policy at national level changes in that intervening period, development plans have not caught up. In the main, development plans are very up to date. As they have been adopted in the past 18 months, you would hope that they are fully in compliance with national policy on a range of issues and, therefore, cases where the board is put to the pin of its collar to refuse something will arise far less frequently. Interestingly, two of the judicial reviews taken against the board in the past involved first parties who have had wind farm developments refused by the board and have challenged our decisions on the grounds that we are taking insufficient heed of climate needs.

That is an interesting angle and not one we had seen before. We hope that county and city councillors, in doing their jobs and adapting their plans, are in compliance with national policy because that makes our job a lot easier.

Senator John Cummins

I am keeping it very general here. Ms Buckley is perfectly correct. All development plans have or are being updated at the moment. Therefore, I would have thought something being out of date would be less of a possibility. They obviously go through the OPR and are assessed in compliance with national and regional planning policy. Theoretically, if something is in a development plan, it does not always go to the council. It can go directly to An Bord Pleanála as the board. A local authority may not have had an opportunity to have a view on it. Would I be correct in understanding from what Ms Buckley is saying that the development plan has to be looked at?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There is a line of legal rulings dating back to the 1970s that say the county development plan in effect is like a contract between the county council and the people in its area. Generally speaking, the board is bound by the county or city development plan. However, as I say, there is a legal provision in the planning Act back to 2000 which allows the board in certain circumstances, even if it identifies that its decision will be in material contravention of the plan, to grant nonetheless. In writing up our decisions in the inspector's report, the hierarchy of national and regional policy, down to the county policy, and indeed to a local area plan, is set out in this report generally in great detail. It is a power we exercise sparingly. I would hope very much that as the plans have been updated and have been through the rigour of the OPR process, they would now be fully in compliance with national policy and therefore the board will not be asked to make these decisions as frequently as was the case perhaps in the last few years.

An Cathaoirleach

I am into the third round of questions now so members can put up their hands.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley gave a figure of 12,000 homes which received planning permission this year. Was it this year or last year?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I said 10,000 and that is an approximate figure since the beginning of the year.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley also provided the figure of how many were rejected.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes. Depending on how they are counted, we rejected approximately 2,500, plus a couple of hundred built as student spaces; we granted about 500 student spaces. The grant refusal rate is about 4:1 approximately.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Four time more are successful.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Exactly.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley also touched on CPOs. There are a number of sites in Cork at the moment; I will not name them. I was at a recent joint policing committee meeting with Cork City Council. It is not just an issue with Cork. If one goes down the quays in Dublin, there are sites to be seen that are derelict and are falling to rack and ruin and this is true right across every city, town and village in the country. How is the CPO process from the point of view of An Bord Pleanála? As far as I know, some people have appealed the decision of the council to acquire the sites by CPO. That goes to An Bord Pleanála then. I would like to see if there is anything we could do. Is there anything Ms Buckley could suggest we could do to speed up that process?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We do not have a huge amount of CPO cases on hand. I have ten which would be local authority CPOs, strategic infrastructure CPOs and other CPOs. It is not a huge area of work for us and it is reasonably quick. Generally speaking, but not always, we have traditionally held an oral hearing for a contested CPO. We have decided in recent times not to do so for some, which is interesting. These matters are often settled on the steps of An Bord Pleanála when the oral hearing is coming up for settlement. That can happen. It is a reasonably robust process and has had very few legal challenges or anything like that. It is worth bearing in mind that obviously everything has been held up in the last year or so in the board so we need to get on top of everything really.

Deputy Thomas Gould

So that is feeding into the delay.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It could be, yes.

Deputy Thomas Gould

To be fair to Ms Buckley, she made the point that An Bord Pleanála must be fully resourced if it is to hit all its targets. When she was before the committee earlier this year, in February or March, she outlined she was looking to move staffing levels from 200 to 300, an increase of 50%. Have all of those positions been approved? I am aware she touched on it earlier with some other members. Of the 100 staff members looked for by An Bord Pleanála, have they all been approved and what stage is it at in terms of numbers? Is it 250 or 270?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We are at 221 as of Friday. It is worth bearing in mind that we probably recruit a bit more than that but then people leave as well so there is a bit of movement. We have a number of job offers out and we have full sanction to go to 313 by the end of the year. The Department has been very good. It has been very responsive when we have come in looking for resources.

Deputy Thomas Gould

What is the likelihood that An Bord Pleanála will reach the 313 by the end of the year?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We will do everything in our power to do so. We are recruiting into a very tight labour market. We have gone out and had a couple of competitions but we did not get people applying. Those would be posts for IT technical skills and things like that. Those staff members are like hen's teeth out there.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley made a point earlier about the new initiative An Bord Pleanála has. Is it with Dublin City University or University College Dublin?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is Technological University Dublin.

Deputy Thomas Gould

It is a great initiative and we probably touched on it in March when Ms Buckley was last with us. I made a comment that nobody I ever knew or met went into planning and I thought there was a job of work there to encourage people and to have the conversation in secondary school about what people would apply for in college.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

The Deputy should not lock himself out. There could be second career in it for him.

Deputy Thomas Gould

There could be. Is this something we should be looking to do with other universities and technical institutions? There is a huge shortage of planners whether it is An Bord Pleanála or in every local authority. Everywhere people need planners, there is a shortage. Even though this initiative is a really positive one, is it big enough to deliver the planners we need?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That would be a really good question to direct to the Department or to the local authority sector. We are only a small bit of the system. In effect the conversation I had with the Department was a follow-on from one it was already having with the local authorities which presumably would be partnering up with their local universities. That is an entirely sensible thing to do. Technological University Dublin happened to be the closest one to us. It is worthwhile us staying local and reducing our carbon miles.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Regarding restructuring, and some of it was covered earlier, will Ms Buckley outline where things are now with the OPR on the code of practice and restructuring? She touched on some of it earlier but is there any update on An Bord Pleanála's section of the planning Bill including governance, timelines and late decisions. She mentioned fines already.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Does the Deputy mean how An Bord Pleanála is getting on with implementing the OPR recommendations? We prepared an implementation plan on which we are giving regular updates to the Department and to the OPR. I am happy to share the next update with the committee once we have completed it, which will be at the end of July. The big ticket item there was the adoption of a new code of conduct. We have been working extremely hard on that and we adopted the new code at our corporate board meeting last Thursday. We worked very hard on it and the board itself and the team had a number of very detailed conversations about it. We are very happy with it and we now need to get about implementing it, recording decisions and potential conflicts and all that. That is something we will be doing now. We are working our way through many of the other requirements that are within the board's gift and we will have a lot of written procedures coming to the next corporate board meeting in July. Those will be the internal allocation of files and all those sorts of things. We are already doing it but we are writing down what we are doing. The OPR is reasonably happy with the progress we have made. Obviously the Deputy can ask it but certainly it has been very complimentary of the sort of things we have been doing to date.

With regard to the Bill, we are working very closely with the Department in trying to ensure the Bill does what the Department wanted to do for An Bord Pleanála in its move into its new governance structures.

We have started the internal conversations ourselves. We had an away afternoon on Monday, in classic style, to discuss what the implications are for the way in which board members work into the new system. We, or I guess my successor, will start to work with the staff in the autumn around what the implications are, and especially what the mandatory timelines implications are, for the way the staff of the board work and how they do their business.

Deputy Thomas Gould

On the 600 appeals relating to the residential zoned land tax, I am aware the board is working its way through those at 30 a week, which may take five months, and then the appeals will come in during October-----

Ms Oonagh Buckley

They will be September.

Deputy Thomas Gould

We can imagine there will be a number of appeals.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Hopefully fewer.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Will this level be predicted for every year or was there a surge this year?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We hope it is a one-off.

Mr. Chris McGarry

On the land value tax, there is a specific law on this, which is not planning law. It came in in one bite, if one wants to call it that. The legislation will compel the local authorities, regardless of whether there is an appeal, to do another review in the autumn and produce the final map of the lands or zoned areas. From our perspective, it struck us as interesting that they all had to arrive at a certain date, hence the 620 appeals that we received. It would seem from the analysis of the local authorities that this will be very much a once-off. They have identified the locations where such a tax is warranted. We have received the 600 or so appeals. An update is being done by some local authorities but I believe it is quite a modest update for September. The tax itself will probably roll over. Once people are liable for the tax, I am sure it will be a different game.

From our perspective, this is not a planning exercise. Counterintuitively, when we deal with these appeals it is the opposite of having to judge whether something is a good scheme or bad scheme. It is simply a net point, namely, to determine whether the case falls within the parameters of the legislation. We had to get three of our colleagues in the inspectorate to go full-time at the cases and read them quickly. Hence, they can produce about 35 recommendations per week. It is my objective then to make sure the board members return that favour with 35 determinations per week. That is why we are at that level of 35 per week. In a 20-week cycle, we will probably see the job done.

Deputy Thomas Gould

Ms Buckley estimated that the board has 74 inspectors at the moment and is hoping to reach 110. When the witnesses appeared before the committee in March, they had no idea this additional work was coming down the track. This requires additional resources and funding. The work this year might be a once-off but the process will be the ongoing.

Mr. Chris McGarry

Under legislation, the board receives functions, if we want to call them that. We carry those out as best we can. Perhaps this was not expected but it is with us. I must say that our colleagues in processing did a great job in getting the whole thing initiated. From my perspective, as the deputy chair of the board, one of my functions is to manage the stream of work as efficiently as possible. We mentioned the three-person board meetings and so on. I am trying to make sure we can almost filter these 600 cases through the normal work. In other words, when we have a meeting to deal with four or five normal appeals, I ask my colleagues to use the opportunity to bring as many of these appeals to these meetings in order that we can be more time efficient. We just have to take whatever obligations are put in front of us. Honestly, we are very happy to do so, although it does put pressure on us on occasion.

Deputy Thomas Gould

I wish Ms Buckley the very best of luck in her new role. I congratulate her on the work that she and her team have done so far in a short space of time. An Bord Pleanála has come in for some vicious criticism. Some of it is certainly deserved but many staff members were probably very disillusioned given all the hard work they were doing on the ground. If we consider the current RTÉ scandal, a lot of hard-working individuals who are doing their jobs day in, day out and week in, week out have been caught in the crossfire.

I hope that by the end of this year or early in the new year, the board can get to where we need to be. This is having a profound effect on the lives of people I deal with, and on their families and businesses. As Ms Buckley said a number of times, the quality of service people are getting is not acceptable. This is not the witnesses' fault. I am being very political here, so the witnesses do not need to respond, but that was due to a lack of resources and support. A lot of things went wrong under different Ministers over the years. We are now in this place where at least the problems are being sorted out. There is, however, real frustration out there.

I wish the staff who are doing their best the best of luck in the work they are doing. I hope the board, as a team, can get us to where we need to be. If there is no proper planning regulation or proper planning system in place, housing and infrastructure provision and climate action are undermined. Ms Buckley made the point that An Bord Pleanála's purpose is not to deliver housing but to deliver proper planning. This is what we need - proper planning delivered in a timely manner. I thank the witnesses for attending and for their contributions. I appreciate it.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I will add to the Deputy's comments on the staff. Staff have done a valiant job. They kept soldiering through and they had a really difficult year last year. It is fair to say they are in a better place now than when I first started. I am very hopeful that the work that we, the leadership of the organisation, will do will keep moving that forward so that all the staff get to enjoy a much better 2023 than they had in 2022.

An Cathaoirleach

I thank Ms Buckley. I will ask some questions next as no other member is indicating. Reference was made to doing a blitz. Will that be done on an ongoing basis, without wearing out the staff first?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Obviously, there is an overtime issue for the staff as well. We reckon that this is probably doable for about one week per month or one week in every six weeks. We found that when going at it for three and a half days solid and then spending the final day of the week writing up the orders and so on is a doable proposition. It is important to note, however, that during the week we are doing this, we are not doing any of the other files. We must keep things moving generally.

An Cathaoirleach

Without adding to the workload of the board, I will make a suggestion. This committee gets a quarterly update from the Land Development Agency on progress on its plans and proposals and where it is on projects. Does the board produce a quarterly report like that? Even a basic quarterly update for the committee to let us know where matters stand would be helpful to demonstrate the progress that has been made.

Ms Bríd Hill

We put up quarterly statistics on our website. We could deliver those to the committee.

An Cathaoirleach

Coming to the website, I have never come across such a clunky old-style technology website. I find it incredibly difficult to navigate the An Bord Pleanála website. There have been advances in e-planning in a number of local authorities. I looked at my local authority planning page recently and it is refreshing to open it up now to search files. It is much easier to navigate. I acknowledge that An Bord Pleanála has many structures to try to negotiate at the moment. Is there a plan for IT, the electronic management of files and the website?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I am very glad the Cathaoirleach asked me this question. We have a case management system that is of its day. Coming from the justice sector, which is very paper-based, An Bord Pleanála's system is pretty high end but it, too, is still very paper based. We are aware of the e-planning system coming at us from the local authority side and we are working up our bit of that. Separately, we also need to replace our own case management system because it has come to the end of its life. We have a big digitisation plan. We need to recruit a director for that area who will lead that challenge and build up the capacity in An Bord Pleanála, which is not really there yet, to try to deliver on that. I mentioned that we had at least one competition where we did not get the result we wanted as regards digital skills. We will be moving towards that and I can only imagine a new website will be an outworking of the overall digital first approach when it is delivered. I am sorry the Cathaoirleach finds the website quite clunky. We could always give him a guided tour if he would like.

An Cathaoirleach

Perhaps I am alone in that.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I am sure he is not.

An Cathaoirleach

On the suggestion of the quarterly review or update, could that be furnished to the committee rather than us having to go to the website?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes.

An Cathaoirleach

That would be helpful. I do not underestimate what is involved from an IT perspective to try to bring in a new case management system while still operating on current cases, trying to move to a transitional arrangement and so on.

There are a couple of things I want to clear up. I fully agree with the retention of the name of An Bord Pleanála. Despite recent events, I always had good faith in An Bord Pleanála and I think the name should be kept.

On the appeals on the zoned land tax that all came at once and resulted in a heavy workload, is there a phasing of the introduction of the zoned land tax, which means that we are likely to see that again or am I getting mixed up?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There is a second round in September and another round next year.

An Cathaoirleach

That is where land was zoned from a certain time comes under zoned land tax. Is there another batch of land to come in?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Gosh, I do not know.

Mr. Chris McGarry

My reading of it, which has been quite scant to get to the basics that we have before us to resolve immediately, is that we are being asked to look at the decision of the local authority that the piece of land in question is one that liable for the tax and in doing that, the local authority has analysed its development plan for a zoning issue and for what is called reasonable access to services and related stuff - three or four elements like that. Once those three or four elements are described in the documentation, our colleagues review that and there is confirmation or otherwise that it is relevant for the zoned tax. We do not really look beyond that. I am not entirely sure whether there is a further exercise. What I do know for sure is that in the autumn, the local authorities will review any plan update that might alter the zoning. If zoning has changed, unrelated to anything An Bord Pleanála does, the local authorities may keep something within the land tax or take it out.

An Cathaoirleach

I was not sure if there was a phasing in the introduction of the zoned land tax, with land zoned at a certain time and land zoned afterwards.

Mr. Chris McGarry

That may be separate, but it would not be part of our decision exercise.

An Cathaoirleach

Everyone associates the board with planning appeals, but another workload that comes to the board is its role in compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, as well. I understand that the Law Reform Commission is doing a review of that at present. Certainly, it was referred to in the Office of the Planning Regulator's report. Has the board had input into that as well? There is a target set in Housing for All for CPOs by local authorities. By setting a target and streamlining the CPO process, will that also increase An Bord Pleanála's work in regard to CPOs?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

I think we were consulted on the Law Reform Commission's work, but the outcome of it was not such as to affect the board's role, which, if memory serves right, was some months ago. The Department is also looking at the law around CPOs and has asked for the expert input of An Bord Pleanála into that work. We have supplied it with the services of one of our senior planners to guide it on the practical functioning of the CPO system.

An Cathaoirleach

Okay. I want to cover a few items that were in the Office of the Planning Regulator's report around the systems and procedures. There were recommendations around declaring conflicts of interest. Can Ms Buckley explain what is being done in that area, especially in cases where a board member has to decide what is proximity to a decision he or she may be working on, whether it is within the county, town, or a kilometre. What is happening in regard to that?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There are two types of potential conflict of interest, locational and relationship. First, it is everybody's responsibility to make sure he or she does not have a conflict on a decision. The old code of conduct stated that a conflict existed if something was in your immediate neighbourhood. A decision was taken not to specify what that was. Other jurisdictions have decided to approach the issue in different ways. In Britain, for example, there is a postcode rule. However, we decided to be really clear about what "immediate neighbourhood" is. In an urban or built-up area, it is 0.5 km, as the crow flies. In a rural area, where people are far more interested in what their neighbours 10 miles away are doing, it is 5 km. Our expectation is that no person working with An Bord Pleanála that the code covers, including the board members, will work on a file that comes within that locational distance of any land that they own. We also expect them not to work on files where there is a locational conflict that is a bit more nebulous. For example, I am from Douglas, so I probably would not deal with a file on Douglas. I would refuse to deal with it. That is the general rule. However, there has to be a bit of tempering of that rule. In Dublin, in particular, where most of the board staff live and work, that blanket rule would mean that sometimes, the board's business could not get done. A prime example of that is BusConnects. BusConnects will go within 0.5 km of everyone. However, no member of the board staff or board member is affected by BusConnects any more than any other travelling member of the public. When we took some recent decisions around BusConnects rulings, as the Chairperson, I said that I can rule that people do not have a conflict of interest. I made a written ruling that if the conflict was on that ground alone, people did not have a conflict. However, if there was a different type of conflict, for example, if you knew somebody had objected or your front garden was being acquired by CPO for it, there would be a definite conflict and you would have to stay out of it. Those kind of things are dealt with very clearly in the code of conduct.

Second, we have an improved rule around relationship conflicts. It is very difficult to define what that means because we all have professional relationships and all that sort of stuff. Obviously, many experienced people come to work with the board, who will have built up professional relationships over the years. What we are saying is that if that relationship is one of family, it is too close. If you have had any involvement in the case in respect of previous employment, there may be a conflict. That follows on from the Cork Harbour Alliance for a Safe Environment, CHASE, ruling concerning Cork Harbour, where at a much earlier stage in their career, a board member had worked on a related project. There may also be a relationship conflict if you have previously worked in a place involved in the previous two years and then obviously, if the case has any implications for any financial interest of anybody associated with you. We are saying that a precautionary approach should be taken. In a single week in An Bord Pleanála, we talk more about conflicts of interest than I have in my entire career up to now. It is a constant issue. For example, I will look something and say that I know that person and have a professional relationship with them but they are not close to me; it is not like I went to their wedding or anything like that. I may know them but there is no conflict there. When we are going through a file, the list of objectors is gone through before the file is opened and then staff members determine whether they might know the people and whether they can deal with the file. In the case of a conflict, the file is taken out of the meeting in general terms. It is a constant requirement that we do this carefully. We are constantly reinforcing that as board members and we will be constantly reinforcing it with staff, so that they all understand that this is a critical part of the recovery of the board's reputation. As we have all seen, where the requirement is not followed, a fatal blow is dealt to the reputation of the organisation.

An Cathaoirleach

That is clearly set out for all board members.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

It is clearly set out for all.

An Cathaoirleach

Does that apply to inspectors as well?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes, it applies to almost everybody working with the board. Those working at clerical level would be the only people not covered. It applies to all fee-per-case inspectors or additional consultants that we bring in.

An Cathaoirleach

What about declarations of interest in terms of declarations of land owned?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

That is all being done effectively. One of the great advantages of having all the interim board members from the civil and public service is that we are all used to making those declarations to the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO. It has been a very routine operation on this occasion.

An Cathaoirleach

I think we covered the rotation of teams on cases.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

Yes.

An Cathaoirleach

I asked that question already. I understand, from the figures we have, that 85% of inspectors' recommendations are upheld by the board. I have seen inspectors' reports and the board's decisions in the past. They do not go into detail of why inspectors' recommendations have were not upheld in the other 11% of cases. I found some of the samples I looked at lacking in detail. Is there now a procedure whereby there is a requirement to set out in clear detail why the board has deviated from the inspector's recommendation? The report of the Office of the Planning Regulator mentions patterns of not adhering to an inspector's recommendation. It does reference-----

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We need to capture those.

An Cathaoirleach

That report references telecommunications.

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We are obliged, in law, to outline enough reasons in decisions where we do not follow the recommendation of the inspector. Are the reasons sufficient? That is one of the Achilles heels of board decisions.

Often, when we lose a case it is because we have not given enough clarity in our reasoning. We are working on that constantly. We have legal teams in briefing us and one of the issues we were dealing with this week was the giving of reasons and things like that. We are clear about what we need to do. It is a human system and human error can prevail but we would hope that inspectors would understand why we had overruled them and that the member of the public, the applicant or whoever, or any intelligent member of the public reading the file, would also understand.

The question of tracking that is one we have been discussing. We probably do not have good enough real-time data yet to do that but that is one of the issues we will be working on in the second half of this year as part of the implementation plan to meet the OPR's recommendations and to try to track those patterns, if there is a pattern. One of the other fail-safes is that we are religiously rotating board members around in different groups of three. You would hope that if groupthink sets in among one person or two people, another person would say that is not what we decided yesterday in a different decision. You would hope that with greater rotation, that sort of thing would be caught at an earlier stage before it became a pattern to be caught by data. We are conscious of the fact that we need to be collecting data in that space, particularly in that key area of the overturning of recommendations.

Mr. McGarry has set up a liaison committee between the board and the inspectorate. This was a feature of previous boards but had gone into abeyance in the last few years. That should pick up where there are differences in approaches between the inspectorate and the board, and allow for those issues to be outed. When the board makes a decision on an inspector's report, the inspector gets notified that the decision has been taken and can check to see what was done. You would hope that if any unusual patterns of decision-making by the board started to come through, it would be picked up in that liaison committee and either the inspectorate would change its approach, because sometimes the inspectors can get it wrong, or the board would say it is at odds with the inspectorate and it needs to work through what that means. It will be a bit like that and it will be a constant iterative process.

An Cathaoirleach

Was there a recommendation that inspectors would be present on the board to deliberate on that?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

There was a recommendation that inspectors would present at board meetings to present the files, that the board would go into head-scratching mode and that the inspector would leave. It has been done before. We had two emergency electricity generation cases that went through in 35 days and those were so exceptional that we got the two reporting inspectors in to brief us on their reports. The full available board made the decisions on those cases before the full available board then went into decision mode. There is some internal concern that this would be an unnecessary burden on the inspectors involved. As it stands, each board member gets the signed files, we read them and we present at the meetings. In general terms, that might be as inefficient a process. It might be something we look to pilot or do in special cases, perhaps in the bigger infrastructure cases and things like that, and to see whether that is a more effective way of getting to the heart of whatever the issue is in the particular file. Most of the time there will be complete agreement between the board member and inspector on it because it is reasonably obvious what the issues are. However, there can be those marginal planning calls or marginal calls on evidence where we might read something differently from the inspector or whatever. It is good that we get that opportunity to tease those issues out, maybe for those bigger files.

An Cathaoirleach

There is an intention that with the inspector's report and the decision of the board, the report of the board would deal in greater detail or in adequate detail on the reasons for-----

Ms Oonagh Buckley

We need to make sure we are giving adequate reasons. Legally, we need to make sure of that.

An Cathaoirleach

In the planning regulator's report, which talked about the pattern in deviations and mentions telecommunications, is that as an example, or was there or is there an investigation ongoing? Is there a report on that particular aspect, decisions on telecommunications?

Ms Oonagh Buckley

As the Cathaoirleach is probably aware, I have asked for a senior counsel external review of a series of case files that were dealt with in previous years. That is essentially to go over the ground that was initially looked at by this internal review, which I cannot publish because of legal advice. Many of the files, including some of the files the Cathaoirleach is talking about, would probably be looked at in the context of that review. I need to be careful because there are live judicial reviews in that space so I cannot go into that in any detail.

An Cathaoirleach

I thank the witnesses. That is the end of all of our questioning. On behalf of the committee members, I congratulate Ms Buckley on her new position, as most members have done. I thank Ms Buckley for the work she has done in the meantime and I see that the board is turning around. It is good to hear that morale is good, that staff have been recruited and that those processes have been put in place. It is critical to delivering everything that people have confidence in the decision makers and the witnesses are doing a good job in that. I ask the witnesses to pass on our thanks to An Bord Pleanála's staff members as well for the blitzing, the overtime work and for trying to clear that backlog.

The joint committee adjourned at 3.56 p.m. until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 11 July 2023.