Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Before I invite Senator Landy to speak, I will stay on the point about the 18-week period for decisions. Later, I will talk about judicial reviews. The board is supposed to make decisions within a statutory objective period of 18 weeks. In the 2004-05 period, just prior to the peak of the property bubble, the board's success rate in this regard was 85%. While the bubble was collapsing, the success rate was collapsing to 23%. According to the 2011 figures, the rate is 81%. However, planning applications have decreased at local authority level, as has the number of appeals. The inconsistency across councils remains the same, yet the amount of work coming across the board's desk is less.

In 2010, the then Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Mr. John Gormley, attended this committee and made a great announcement about seconding local planning officers to An Bord Pleanála to help with the backlog.

We need to differentiate between a backlog and a bottleneck. Dr. Kelly said there is a bottleneck in An Bord Pleanála, but is it a backlog or a bottleneck? They are two separate things. Both the staff numbers and the workload of An Bord Pleanála have been reduced; however, it is still not achieving the 100% target. I recognise the difficulties with strategic infrastructure developments. There can be oral hearings and so on which can run on for weeks and delay things. In respect of the "meat and veg" cases which should be able to make the 18-week period, it is worrying that this is not happening. Could assistance from planning officials in many planning departments across the country who are not busy at the moment be sought to deal with the backlog or is this something the board can meet within its existing resources?