Ms Oonagh Buckley:

It is interesting. I do not want to go into too much detail on the proposals in Part 9. Going back over the years there have been a number of attempts to review the procedural aspects of judicial review in planning. I did some of them myself back in the day. We are advertising for a director of legal affairs to come into the board. I am hopeful that we will get a decent application field for that. It will be a challenging role for whoever chooses to come in and join us, but one with a great deal of interest. It could perhaps be a stepping stone to greater things down the line.

The difficulty with the surge in judicial reviews that has taken place within the board is to do with the effort of handling them from within the board. We have two external legal firms that are very good and very supportive of the board, but the number of judicial reviews has been such that it has, to a certain extent overwhelmed the capacity of those legal firms and of the internal teams that have been trying to deal with them while dealing with their day jobs.

It is, therefore, a welcome development that we are looking to further resources in that space, because having an in-house legally-trained team would help us in managing and having a litigation strategy around all those cases.

It has struck me since I joined the board that the chairperson, by virtue of an internal policy, must sign off on every concession and we are conceding cases on basic grounds. In part this is because the High Court, and in particular the judges who sit on the planning list, are getting ever more detailed in the requirements they are making of the board. The requirements being sought today, if we are to win a case, were not in place even two years ago and. therefore, there is a certain element of moving goalposts in this as well, perhaps correctly.

Something I have spoken to the Department about, though we have not go into much detail, is if we are to manage the judicial review load on An Bord Pleanála as well as resource the board, we have to look to the quality and reasons given in the board's decisions but also to whether the language in the rest of the Bill is such that it is applying too high a hindsight view on the decisions the board needs to take, bearing in mind the complexity and range of issues that must be balanced in coming to any individual planning decision. It is, as the Chair will be aware, a balance of interests. It always is because of the appeal and the first part and all that. Regardless of what is done on the specific section dealing with judicial review standing and all those other issues, there are changes we perhaps need to look at throughout the Bill that will help the board deliver decent-quality decisions that explain why it made its decision to the parties involved but that perhaps are not held up to a microscopic standard, which has tended to be the case when we end up in front of the High Court.