Ms Angela Denning:

It very much depends on the case. Where the parties go for the expedited procedure and they have legal teams who know everything about planning, that can move relatively quickly. If everybody stuck to the time limits in the rules, everything would be done in four or five months. Unfortunately, that does not always happen for various reasons. People may look for extra time to prepare their papers. There is a big difference between a case where a developer has been refused permission by the coimisiún and a case where an individual does not want their next-door neighbour building an extension that may block their light or whatever it may be. The smaller the case, the longer it is likely to take.

In cases that are strategically issued to try to stop developments going ahead, one party there is not interested in getting the case moving quickly. The good thing is that consent is not required to use the expedited procedure. That is something judges are very clear about. In the new rules, the judge can decide that he or she will use the expedited procedure and that will speed things up. Some of the simple tweaks to the list have actually speeded things up. For example, the applicant is responsible for uploading the papers onto a share file. All those kinds of things have brought clarity as to whose job it is to do different parts of the procedure. Because of that clarity, fewer people are coming into court asking for directions on it or back and forth between the parties in correspondence, and then they come into court looking for another adjournment because they need to sort something out.

Our legal system is adversarial and much of it is left to the parties to sort out between themselves. However, directions are now given fairly early in the procedure so that everybody knows where they stand and knows the workload ahead of them. The view of the court is that the judges want to spend less time dealing with procedural matters and more time hearing actual cases. Therefore, they will make orders on the papers, and try to sort out directions and things like that between the parties by correspondence rather than wasting court time dealing with it.