An Bord Pleanála internal inquiry seeks ‘to learn’ from ‘particularly difficult’ 2022

An Bord Pleanála chairwoman Oonagh Buckley will tell PAC that 'the morale of staff was badly affected'. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

The new chair of An Bord Pleanála commissioned an internal investigation at the planning authority in order “to learn” from the body’s “particularly difficult” 2022 and to ensure the year of scandal “cannot reoccur”.

Oonagh Buckley, a senior civil servant temporarily seconded to An Bord Pleanála from the Department of Justice following the departure of former chairman Dave Walsh last November, will on Thursday tell the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that she appointed senior counsel Lorna Lynch to carry out a “scoping investigation” into a number of An Bord Pleanála’s case files and to make recommendations “as to any necessary next steps”.

The difficulties at An Bord Pleanála resulted in a 25% reduction in the number of decisions made, €1.34m incurred in fines as a result of late decisions, and a huge increase in legal costs.

Ms Buckley will tell the PAC that Ms Lynch has recently begun interviewing An Bord Pleanála employees as part of that investigation, and that she as interim chair has requested that the final report “should be capable of being published”, though such publication “may need to be deferred” should a disciplinary action be merited by the investigation’s conclusions.

Ms Lynch’s remit was initially understood to have been the review of a controversial internal report commissioned by Mr Walsh last year, titled ‘Examination of Certain Matters’, which painted a devastating picture of practices and conflicts of interest at the board and confirmed a series of media allegations that had surfaced since April 2022.

That report has never been officially published, though its contents were reported upon by the Irish Examiner in October and November last year, immediately prior to Mr Walsh’s departure.

Ms Buckley is expected to tell the PAC that 2022 represented a “particularly difficult year” for An Bord Pleanála, with the “major regulatory and public attention” to which the board was subjected having had “a serious detrimental impact” on its reputation.

“It is fair to say the morale of staff was also badly affected,” she will tell the committee.

'Performance disimproved'

The chair will tell the committee that as a result, with 2,090 determinations made, the number of decisions delivered by the board fell by 25% on its 2021 levels.

She will state that 134 penalty payments of €10,000 apiece, on the back of late decisions regarding fast-track strategic housing development applications, cost the board €1.34m in 2022, and that its legal costs over the past three years have increased by a factor of 2.5, with €7.8m paid to external legal advisors to that end in 2021 alone.

Ms Buckley will tell the committee that reducing its backlog of one year's worth of cases while restoring “timely decision-making" to appeals is a key priority for An Bord Pleanála in 2023.