Dail Committee: The Department of the Environment is examining the planning performance of local authorities on foot of data showing a huge discrepancy in the proportion of decisions overturned on appeal by An Bord Pleanála.
Ms Mary Moylan, assistant secretary in charge of the department's planning division, told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee yesterday that the issue was being raised with the relevant local authorities.
She also said the department would be publishing new guidelines next month on the city and county development plans. Further guidelines would deal with wind farms and the controversial issue of rural housing.
Earlier, the chairman of An Bord Pleanála, Mr John O'Connor, said the rate at which local authority planning decisions were being overturned by the board ranged from 9 per cent in some areas to 56 per cent in others.
Mr Michael Smith, national chairman of An Taisce, said it was achieving a 90 per cent success rate for its appeals. These numbered 300 last year out of a total of 3,500 cases on which it had made submissions.
The Public Accounts Committee was hearing the views of An Taisce, the Department of the Environment and An Bord Pleanála on a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General on "value for money" in the appeals process. The comptroller, Mr John Purcell, said the board had managed to reduce the backlog of appeals and could be considered to be "doing a good job". Its integrity was "above reproach" and its impartiality in making decisions was widely accepted.
Speaking on behalf of the board, Mr O'Connor said it was now determining almost 80 per cent of appeals within the statutory 18-week period and that the quality of its planning decisions would "stand up to scrutiny from any quarter".
Questioned by the committee's chairman, Mr John Perry TD (FG, Sligo-Leitrim), he said the board had spent €2.4 million last year on consultancy fees, mainly to private sector planners engaged to clear the backlog of appeals.
The board also paid out €750,000 in legal costs to deal with an "increasing trend" of judicial review challenges to its decisions by aggrieved parties.
Altogether, 33 such cases were instituted in the High Court last year, Mr O'Connor said.
He conceded that a provision in the 2000 Planning Act requiring that third-party appellants must first have made submissions to a local authority had led to a "very substantial increase" in the number of appeals deemed invalid.
In reply to Mr John Dennehy TD (FF, Cork South Central), Mr O'Connor agreed that planning was "not an exact science", but said An Bord Pleanála was guided by the provisions of local development plans and national policies.
Responding to Mr Joe Higgins TD (Socialist Party, Dublin West), who had asked about rural housing, he said the difficulty lay in striking a balance between genuine need and having houses "sticking up out of every field".
Mr Padraig McCormack (FG, Galway West) criticised An Taisce for allegedly lodging appeals against decisions made by local authorities on the basis of their performance and said this practice should be further investigated.
But Mr Ian Lumley, An Taisce's heritage officer, said Leitrim County Council had questions to answer, given that only two out of 20 of its decisions appealed by the trust over the past year had been upheld by the board.
The others, mainly involving houses in sensitive areas of the countryside, had been overturned on the basis that they would be prejudicial to public health by polluting groundwater or to public safety by creating traffic hazards.