Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are having a lot of discussion about judicial review, and it is important, but it is important also to remember that less than 3% of planning applications get judicially reviewed. I am not picking Mr. Hogan up on something, but he did mention earlier that judicial reviews should not become a normal part of the planning process. It is important that this committee emphasises that they are not a normal part of the planning process. A very small number of decisions get judicially reviewed. They often have to be very high-profile, which is why they get a lot of attention. People who do not follow the detail of the planning process would possibly think that judicial reviews happen all the time whereas they are a rare occurrence. That is not an argument for or against them; I am just making the point.

One of my concerns, to which I would be interested in Mr. Hogan's or any other witness's response, is about both judicial review and, more generally, the improvement of the planning system that the Bill purports to achieve. We had a similar set of arguments with very different legislation that was brought in by some of the Minister's predecessors, including in 2016, when the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, brought in the strategic housing development, SHD, legislation, which we were told would speed things up. At the time, a number of us on the committee were fearful that it would actually have the opposite effect, that it would lead to more conflicts of law and more litigation, and that transpired to be the case. Whatever the intention of the legislation, the effect was that for certain categories of residential developments it actually slowed things down. There is a view - we will probably hear it from people who come before the committee over the next four and a half weeks - that, in fact, if the plan-making inter-relationship between central government planning policy statements and local democracy and the changes to the courts are not got right, we could end up with increased points of conflict between the specific planning policy requirements, SPPRs, national planning policy statements, development plans and planning decisions and that the outworking of some of the judicial review provisions could lead to increased litigation, including satellite litigation or litigation to superior courts - the European Court of Justice, for example. Has any of that been stress-tested, given that measures we were told previously would speed things up or improve the system did not do so? Has there been any attempt to ask the following questions? What if this does not work the way we think it will work? Could we actually end up with more litigation as a result of this? Could we end up with more conflicts between development plans and ministerial statements? Has that been assessed? That is what I am asking.