Mr. Niall Cussen:

I thank the Deputy for the question. My colleague Mr. Ryan, who is director on the review side, may provide some supplementary material on this. There are a couple of points to bear in mind. The Deputy has covered this in the past himself.

Under the current planning Act, the Office of the Planning Regulator is precluded from undertaking reviews or examinations of An Bord Pleanála in relation to complaints made by members of the public. There is a specific exclusion of the board which may have had to do with protecting the independence of the board and the office not getting involved. I was not privy to the rationale for that in the past. The Bill changes that and we are very clearly in that space. We can entertain complaints. I do not want to get into the circumstances around the correspondence and so on. I do not disagree with anything the Deputy says in relation to the credibility or reputation of the person who contacted us but we were very conscious of working within the legal framework that was in force at the time - and is in force - and at the same time signalling very clearly that the matters were extremely serious. We were approaching a point at which we believed the conditions existed where a more general examination of certain matters which had arisen in the board was appropriate.