Mr. Peter Mullan:

I will start. I will defer to my colleague on infrastructure and I will ask Mr. Baneham to address some of the legal issues. I will give opening comments on it. The Deputy asked where planning has delayed decisions. There is no question that a number of large infrastructure projects which arrived in 2022, 2023 and into 2024 were delayed. The papers we supplied to the committee set out a significant number of projects. The 12 Dublin BusConnects projects have all gone through the building and been dealt with. The Galway BusConnects project has been dealt with. The Slane bypass decision was delivered yesterday. A large number of renewable projects have all been delivered. They were delayed within our building but that was a product not of planning legislation or difficulties, rather, of the backlog that had developed. Regarding the issues I dealt with in my opening remarks on the backlog that emerged during 2022, there is a number of fairly significant larger cases on which we are very confident decisions will come out in the next few weeks. That is colouring everybody's perspective of our organisation.

My colleague Mr. Baneham will specifically be able to deal with delays in the courts. There have been rule changes and additional resourcing by the High Court of the environmental court.

The Heather Hill decision is a very significant one. The paperwork, which the Deputy has clearly seen, contains a graph of the caseloads, showing an exponential increase. The Heather Hill case was in 2022 and in the following year and the year after that, there was a doubling in the number of judicial review cases because of the Heather Hill judgment. It has had a very significant effect on the number of judicial reviews. This is a perfect opportunity for me to hand over to Mr. Baneham.