Ms Oonagh Buckley:

The primary tasks of the person we are appointing, and anybody we appoint to the legal unit, will be twofold. First, they must develop a proper litigation strategy for An Bord Pleanála so it has oversight of that, which includes conceding cases at an earlier stage if they have to be conceded because that reduces our costs. The second thing would be to make sure the board learns, that it keeps learning, changes its processes, changes the way it makes decisions and makes decisions more robustly. We also have two very activist judges working on the planning lists and they are making very far-reaching decisions. Sometimes the board can be at a stage where it made a decision based on what it understood to be the correct law at an earlier stage and a decision is then taken a year or two years later that says it applied the rules of the policy or whatever incorrectly. At that point, there is now a chain of cases based on the same issue and so it has to concede all those subsequent cases because it was applying the same thought processes to all of them.