Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will take the whole speaking slot because my colleague is unavoidably absent.

There are a number of issues in regard to An Bord Pleanála. Long before anyone made any allegation of impropriety, I had been complaining about the total inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the board. I believe that one of the first signs of a problem is when organisations become totally incompetent at doing what they are meant to be doing, there is a pile-up of material and nobody ever seems to be able to get a clear answer to anything.

One of the problems is, of course, that we do all of the investigations post factum. I hope that this time we will get it right and make sure there is a good, open and transparent system.

For years An Bord Pleanála has been an organisation that has let down ordinary people time and again. There is a statutory objective whereby it is meant to make decisions within four months. I was looking at a list of queries in which people were not making representations on decisions but asking when those decisions would be made. This is a legitimate question. When an application is made it pops up on the website that there will be a decision four months from the date it is submitted. I know of a case in Moycullen that was lodged on 12 March 2021. I do not care what the decision is as long as it is the right decision. We are now in the ninth month of 2022, a year and a half later, and An Bord Pleanála cannot make up its mind. I know of another case lodged on 13 August 2021 in which no decision has been made.

The next case I will mention is fascinating. It involves seeking leave to apply for substitute consent. The request is for leave to apply for substitute consent and not substitute consent itself. It was lodged on 5 October 2021. In other words, it is almost a year later and there is still a wait to get a decision on whether an application can be made for substitute consent. It is a type of planning permission where there are issues regarding environmental impact statements and non-compliance. In this case the person making the application had no connection to the people who were not in compliance with the quarry law.

I want to highlight this next case because it seems extraordinary that it was lodged on 31 December 2021 and there is still no decision. The application is with regard to previously granted permission to renovate and extend a derelict building in the countryside. It is a one-off derelict building. Surely it does not take nine months to decide whether someone can renovate and extend an existing house. The next case was lodged on 21 January and involves the demolition of a cottage and construction of a house. It is eight months since it was lodged. We would think it would not be that complex.

The next case I will mention is the worst case I am aware of, and the Leas-Cheann Comhairle would agree with me on this. Galway City Council bought a house in Kiltullagh. Mysteriously, one night the house got burned down. Galway City Council applied to demolish and rebuild the house for the family to whom it had been allocated. I grant that there were any amount of objections but I have to say it seems that those objections were more about who was getting the house. The family are people of impeccable character but they belong to a minority community. They are waiting for a house and are living in a caravan. The application to An Bord Pleanála was made in April. More than four months have passed. We would have thought that if somebody's house burned down and we wanted to rebuild it for them to live in it that it would be a very simple planning decision. When I add up all of these cases and other cases I find totally ineffective decision making.

I do not know whether any Member has seen the film "A Man For All Seasons". When the titular character was coming out of the court one day somebody tried to bribe him, telling him about their daughter's case in a certain court. He gave a very quick answer in two parts. He said he would make the same decision he would make in the case of his own daughter and that it would be a fair decision and a quick decision. The second part of this is part of justice; justice delayed is justice denied. It is symptomatic of an organisation being totally incompetent that it cannot make decisions in good time even on the simplest of matters. When we have a chaotic organisation chaotic things happen. An Bord Pleanála needs reform from top to bottom. We do not need another agency. Replacing an agency because it does not perform is codology. The concept of an appeals board that is independent, fair and effective is perfectly reasonable but it should be fair and effective.

When looking at organisations we get in all types of experts but one thing we never seem to do is get in a process auditor. Those working in industry focus every day on making sure nothing has to be done twice, getting rid of all the logjams and delays, making sure that something is moved only once and not twice and that people do not tie themselves up in knots answering as to why something has not been done. Can we imagine all of the calls An Bord Pleanála is getting? I mentioned only a few cases. Imagine the waste of labour. Imagine the work that staff could be doing if it were done properly. There is waste in these organisations. I could say the same about visa applications.

Queues take staff, time, money and resources. We should eliminate the queues and do things in the time indicated. If we did this we would not need quite as many staff because people would not be endlessly answering queries as to when a decision would be made. It is vital that an organisation that does not deliver on time all of the time has a process auditor. Perhaps if this had happened in An Bord Pleanála four, five, six, eight or ten years ago, when it started slipping behind its statutory targets, some of the issues, which I do not want to comment on because they could wind up before the courts, would have come to light. This might have happened if somebody had gone in and looked through the processes to see whether they were good and efficient and delivered to the citizens of the country fair, good and timely decisions.

I have to say the idea of allowing two people on their own to make major planning decisions seems a recipe for disaster. Most people would have thought the big decisions were not made in such a way. A one-off house is one thing. We do not seem to have any graduated decision-making. We seem to treat the replacement of a house that was burned down, where a family just wants to go back and live in it, the same as a very big office block, apartment block or housing development. We do not seem to have any proportionality in the system regarding the checks and balances in larger decisions that affect many people and are more likely to be contentious.

We need to follow the issues that have been raised right to the very end. I am glad it has been referred to various agencies. They should be allowed to do their business through the processes the State has set up to deal with anybody who might or might not have acted in a wrong way.

We need to reform the board. We need to reform its decision-making. We need to make sure that it is fair and open and that the systems are good. The other thing we need to do, because justice delayed is justice denied, is to make sure that decisions are made in good time and that files are not lying round waiting to be dealt with interminably, while people have to put their lives on hold. I hope that out of this morass of a mess we, at last, have brought the An Bord Pleanála issue to a head and that we will get a much more effective and transparent system out of the changes that will now be brought in.

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