Ms Oonagh Buckley:

Sorry. It has been pointed out to me that in many of those cases we conceded last year, we do not have a final legal bill yet. Either the final bill has not been presented or we have not agreed to what the final bill is. We can certainly try to get the Deputy a breakdown of costs of concessions, specifically in earlier years.

How can I frame this? In some respects, some of those concession cases are concessions because we just made errors, so there is not a legal approach that is wrong. However, it is important that we have a litigation strategy so that the dual role of legal services will be to introduce a litigation strategy for An Bord Pleanála so it can decide, at a quicker stage; for example, if you have to concede a case, it is just conceded, because it reduces the cost to the board. The second approach will need to be to introduce a thorough feedback loop to the board so we learn as we go along. We need to learn from the cases we lose and concede as much as we learn from the cases we win. This sort of absence of feedback loops is one of the things I have heard most since I came to the board. People, particularly on the inspectorate, feel that they need to know more about why the board is losing or conceding cases. Making sure we are robust about that learning will be one of the biggest challenges facing that internal head of legal services. That learning can relate to our procedures or to the robustness of decisions as expressed. Many of the times, in the stuff I have seen so far, when we are conceding or losing cases, it is not necessarily that the planning decision that was reached was wrong, but that the board failed to articulate its reasoning clearly enough to meet the rigorous standard expected by the courts. It is in that space that some of these decisions land. As I said, some of them arise because a case is argued on a particular policy point or whatever before the courts, and the courts rule against the board, but the same thinking has been underlying subsequent decisions, which have themselves been judicially reviewed.

As we have lost the initial case, we have to concede on that ground in the other cases. The other point to make, and which I have made before, is that there could be 30, 40 or 50 grounds argued in any individual judicial review and the board has to win them all. If it loses on one ground, the case has to go. It is quite a challenging thing. That is why we badly need these in-house capabilities to bring us up to speed.