Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. O'Connor for appearing before the committee. To refer to a point made earlier when wind energy was being discussed, it was said that while Grid25 was closely connected to wind energy, there was no connection to the export of wind energy. Page 7 of "Grid25: A Strategy for the Development of Ireland's Electricity Grid for a Sustainable and Competitive Future" refers to increasing Ireland's connectivity to the European grid, allowing both bulk exports of electricity and imports of electricity when appropriate. Grid25 is involved in the export of energy. It is important to clarify that point for the record.

As a native of south Kildare, I wish to raise the issue of the Greenstar Recycling Holdings Ltd. application for a landfill at Usk in the middle of the last decade. Greenstar Recycling Holdings Ltd. received planning permission for a landfill development at Usk from An Bord Pleanála in July 2006, after being refused permission by Kildare County Council. The board's inspector had recommended against granting permission at that time. I live very close to the area and I know the local residents very well. I know what they went through in this ten year battle. It was very much a David and Goliath battle. It was a small, tight-knit community of approximately 150 households against the might of the State. When they opposed this decision in the courts, the board admitted that it had not maintained satisfactory records leading to the decision and that it had not properly monitored the public planning file. Contrary to law, the file was not available for inspection at various times.

Mr. Justice Kelly quashed the decision in a High Court judgment in March 2007 and he remitted the case back to the board for further consideration. He recommended in that judgment that it would be prudent that the consideration of the case would be undertaken by members of the board who had not been involved in the granting of permission. The recommendation was made to avoid any possible suggestion of bias or objective bias. On 30 July 2008, An Bord Pleanála, under Mr. O'Connor's chairmanship, again granted Greenstar Recycling Holdings Ltd. planning permission for a 200,000 tonne waste facility at Usk. The board had again disagreed with its inspector's decision. In light of Mr. O'Connor's comments earlier that only 12% of permissions from the board went against inspectors' recommendations, the residents of Usk must feel very hard done by that in these two cases it went against the inspector's decision and against the decision of the local authority to refuse planning permission for this.

In spite of Mr. Justice Kelly's recommendations of 2007, four members of the board who were involved in the 2006 decision were also involved in the 2008 decision. Mr. O'Connor wrote a memorandum on 17 June 2008 in respect of this in which he said that the project in question is a major and significant infrastructural development which would, in accordance with established practice within the board, be decided at a board meeting involving the chairperson and deputy chairperson, and that it was agreed that the most appropriate course would be to convene a meeting of all available board members, that is, those who participated previously and those who did not, to decide the appeal. This was emphasised in the memorandum. It was a complete contradiction of what Mr. Justice Kelly had recommended. Commenting on this, the judge said that the logic of the board's reasoning here was unfathomable. The reason the judge handed this case back to the board, and there was an argument for him not doing so in the first place, was to avoid a situation of objective bias, but in 2008 the judge quashed the board's second decision on the grounds of objective bias on the part of the four board members. It could not have been made clearer. The board was given a second shot at it but, under Mr. O'Connor's chairmanship, it decided to ignore that judgment.

I do not know if Mr. O'Connor knows how much that decision and the case in general cost the State, but I know from living close to Usk that it cost the residents. I remind the committee that this is a small, close-knit community of approximately 150 households. The ten year battle cost the residents approximately €400,000, so it probably cost the State significantly more. I guess it would have been approximately €1 million.

The reason I raise this is that we are here to talk about Mr. O'Connor's curriculum vitae, where he was in the past and his potential new role if he is appointed chairman of EirGrid. The local group in Usk made a number of attempts, both in between appeals and outside the court setting, to meet and engage with Mr. O'Connor to discuss this with him and try to explain the group's viewpoint. This was not a case of "not in my back yard". The site was wholly inappropriate, for various reasons, for a very large commercial landfill.

For whatever reason, the board seemed intent on steam-rolling through a decision to grant Greenstar this planning permission.