An Bord Pleanála chair orders board members to review declarations of interest

The An Bord Pleanala office on Molesworth Street, Dublin. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins Dublin

The head of An Bord Pleanála has instructed his fellow board members to review their declarations of interest after allegations of misconduct were made against his former deputy.

Dave Walsh, the chair of the embattled planning authority, said he had asked "all board members to review their declarations to make sure that they’re up to date" in the wake of a series of controversies.

Mr Walsh was addressing the Public Accounts Committee for the first time since his deputy chair Paul Hyde had resigned his post amid a series of allegations and investigations regarding his conduct in the role.

A review of some of Mr Hyde’s decisions by senior counsel Remy Farrell is investigating alleged conflicts of interest in terms of his refusal of planning permission for a development in Cork city next to a property he co-owns, a fact he had failed to declare in his annual statement of interests to the body.

The hearing also heard that an internal ABP review of 200 decisions made by Mr Hyde will consider the “effectiveness of compliance with the current systems and procedures for making statutory declarations of interests”.

Also included in the terms of reference of that review – one of at least three currently ongoing – are an evaluation of ABP’s procedures for ascertaining that decisionmakers are connected with the property they are deciding upon and whether or not “identifiable trends” exist within the decisions of board members.

Mr Walsh told the hearing that “subject to legal advice” he intends to publish a review when it concludes at the end of this month, adding that he has had no input into the probe which is being conducted by a three-man senior management team, including ABP’s director of corporate affairs Gerard Egan.

Legal costs

Regarding the spiralling legal costs incurred by An Bord Pleanala, which have accounted for fully one third – roughly €8m - of the authority’s budget since 2021, Mr Walsh said the outcome of ABP’s own review “may well conclude that systems and procedures are not as strong as they should be”.

A major reason for those escalating costs has been the myriad challenges taken (and mostly won) in the courts against strategic housing developments since 2018.

Regarding issues with the robustness and good faith nature of the board’s decisions, and as to why problems such as Mr Hyde’s alleged conflicts of interest or his domination of telecommunications mast decisions were missed, Mr Walsh said that “the system is based on personal responsibility and integrity in the first instance”.

“When an organisation... is dealing with large numbers of complex cases there has to be a certain level of trust within the system,” he said.