Mick Clifford: TDs huff and puff, but no An Bord Pleanála apology granted
Gareth Collins An The Bord Photos Dublin / Pleanala Picture: Chaney Office In
Apologise! Do it — say you’re sorry. Apologise. Will ya, for the love of God, come out and do the decent thing?
They lined up to extract an apology yesterday at the Public Accounts Committee meeting.
Appearing before the politicians was Dave Walsh, chairman of An Bord Pleanála, an organisation currently up to its oxters in controversy. This was the first public outing for Mr Walsh since allegations began to go like firecrackers in the media two months ago.
The man at the centre of the controversy, former vice chairman Paul Hyde, resigned last Friday, so he was a dead duck as far as the PAC is required.
Mr Walsh was before the politicians in May of last year and he told them that all was hunky dory in the appeals board. Yesterday, some of them were gagging for some mea culpa.
Where’s our apology?
Imelda Munster was up first. She read out the transcript from the last occasion and asked him to apologise. He wouldn’t. She went through salaries and such like, and finished up with: “That’s some mess you left us with, and you still don’t want to apologise?”
Matt Carthy wanted an apology. “Did you read back the transcript of your last appearance?” he asked Mr Walsh.
“Were you mortified or embarrassed?”
No, he wasn’t.
High dudgeon informed Verona Murphy’s questions. “You don’t feel the need to apologise because there are no results of the [ongoing] review? We have €8.2m in legal fees, and that doesn’t warrant an apology?” No luck there, and on it went.
PAC hearings can often be a mixture of performative anger and actual probing, and yesterday it was difficult at times to know where one ended and the other began.
The committee’s ostensible brief is to probe financial issues and, by extension, governance. And it was governance that was the main focus, as that is at the heart of the controversies, which centre on conflicts of interest, deviating from inspectors’ reports, and the composition of sub boards which made controversial decisions. These are the subjects of ongoing reviews — one external by a senior counsel and another internal by three management figures.
There was some light as well as the angry heat.
On the governance of conflicts of interest, Mr Walsh confirmed that this largely had to be on trust. Board members are required to make a declaration. He pointed out that he was raised in north Dublin and he would recuse himself if a matter came up in the direct neighbourhood of his mother’s home, but not, for instance, if it was at the far end of the parish.
“An individual will know whether something is too close to them or if it’s somebody they know or is a connected person,” he said.
Whether that code was adhered to will be a matter for senior counsel Remy Farrell to decide, as he has been tasked by the Minister for Housing to investigate the matter.
The issue of inspectors’ reports was also raised. The inspector investigates an appeal or planning application, visits the site, correlates all relevant reports, and recommends either yay or nay to the board. It has emerged that Mr Hyde ignored such recommendations on up to 90% of cases in recent years in relation to telecommunications masts. There were also other high-profile cases where he disregarded the recommendation and granted an appeal.
According to Mr Walsh yesterday, ignoring the recommendation would generally occur in around 10% of cases. The apparent discrepancy “is outside of normal expectation of the statistical distribution”, Mr Walsh replied. It also gives rise to questions that hopefully one or both reviews might answer.
Other queries centred on the composition of sub divisions of the board making decisions. A controversy has arisen over a two-person as opposed to the customary three making the decisions on the communication masts. Most of those involved the same two members of the board — Mr Hyde and Michelle Fagan.
The former Labour leader Alan Kelly, in the spirit of declaring an interest, told the committee that he was the minister who had ordered a review of An Bord Pleanála to which a number of the committee members had referred, and back in those glory days, Mr Walsh had been an assistant secretary in his department.
He brought up the issue of competency in EU law, asking how many cases involving the board were before the European Court of Justice. These, Kelly pointed out, had mainly to do with interpretations of EU directives on habitat and environmental protection. Unlike other issues around the board, the habitat directive does not have a whiff of cordite about it, but the failure of the board to properly implement it has been very costly to the State, and a drag on good and expedient planning.
On this, Walsh was on safe ground. It was a matter not for his organisation, but the department. He nearly breathed the relief across the room at his former boss.
So it went in the stocks for Mr Walsh, his torture completed after three hours.
He did alright in terms of holding his own, but none of that disguises the big job of work he has in regaining public confidence in An Bord Pleanála.
That will take a lot more than a much-sought-after apology.