Mr. David Moloney:

I will hand over to Mr. Cleary to bring him up to speed with what has happened in the past couple of weeks since the group was stood up and explain what kind of things they are doing. On the broader question, the planning, legal and administrative consent processes are very much under the spotlight with respect to the extent to which they support or impede infrastructure delivery. I always go back to the idea that we have doubled capital spend since 2019. We have quadrupled it in ten years. We started from a very low level of spend and of infrastructure, so the level of need is really high. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, suggests we are 25% lower in our infrastructure stock than a country of our size of income should be. That is a function of how we got here. The question then is how we get out of here. The Planning and Development Act is an attempt to do that. We have resourced the consenting authorities. We have resourced An Bord Pleanála very significantly. We have resourced local authorities for planners, although they have challenges in recruiting planners, so we are conscious of that. Then there are the developments in the legal system in recent years. If you were to look back to the 2010s you might see 20 judicial reviews a year and if you look at the 2020s you might see 80. There are significant developments in how the legal framework is applied within the planning process. We see those as really big issues. Some of them will be dealt with as the Planning and Development Act rolls out and the environmental costs regime is addressed. We also feel that right across the system the urgency of getting things done, doing things in a proportionate and balanced way, securing value for money, well-planned delivery and having an emphasis on delivery is possible. What we are looking at are the day-to-day things that block and slow down decision-making on infrastructure delivery. We want to identify where they happen and measure where they happen. Mr. Cleary might describe the process we plan to go through to get to that.