Mick Clifford: The fall from grace of planning chief Paul Hyde
Chair Dan An Pleanála Deputy District At Linehan Paul Former Bord Bandon Hyde Court Yesterday Picture:
He is still a relatively young man, well plugged into the upper echelons of the construction industry, and should be able to retrieve his career in some manner.
However, his time on the planning board suggests that he was totally unsuited for the role of one of the highest offices in a powerful organisation.
In the latter half of his decade-long tenure in the planning body he was central to a shift in culture that saw the stock of the previously unimpeachable organisation plummet to a shocking low.
Mr Hyde attended Presentation Brothers College in Cork before going on to receive qualifications in architecture and planning at Trinity College and UCC.
Hyde worked in a family business, the Hyde Partnership, headed up by his architect father Stephen.
In 2012, Coveney appointed Paul Hyde to the Marine Institute. Then in 2014, he was appointed to the planning board.
How he was appointed became the focus of much comment last year when the controversies blew up.
Appointments to An Bord Pleanála are through a nomination process in which a range of civic and business bodies nominate names to the minister, who then decides.
Hyde was nominated by the Irish Rural Dwellers Association, a body that advocated strongly for one-off housing. The only
problem is that at the time of Hyde’s nomination the IRDA had been wound up.
How exactly his name came before the minister of the day, Phil Hogan, to facilitate his nomination has never been fully cleared up.
When he joined An Bord Pleanála, the chair was Mary Kelly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Ms Kelly ran a tight ship, ensuring that An Bord Pleanála maintained the high standing it had at a time when many other institutions had succumbed to one type of scandal or another.
“She was a formidable head of the place,” a former employee of the board told the .
“Not necessarily the easiest to get along with but she made sure nobody stepped out of line and it was only after she was gone that it became obvious how important that was.”
In 2017 Hyde was appointed chair of the sub-group on the board which looked after strategic housing developments. (SHDs).
The SHDs were developments in excess of 100 housing units that applied directly to An Bord Pleanála for planning permission, bypassing the relevant local authority.
In 2018, when her tenure was completed, Ms Kelly was replaced by Dave Walsh, who came from the Department of Housing. Sources in An Bord Pleanála have pointed out that he had a different management style.
“Nice fella, he got along with people, but at the same time some in there saw an opportunity to do things their own way.”
Three months after taking office, Walsh recommended to the minister for housing that Hyde be appointed his deputy chair.
Over the following three years, the previously-tight ship began to creak.
Hyde somehow neglected to declare a number of property interests in his annual declarations.
In his position, he was well placed to delegate jobs to fellow board members and choose which ones he would sit in on. Some of his choices were inexplicable.
For instance, in the area of telecoms mast applications, he and just one other board member made decisions in 71 out of 100 cases. This dominance of two individuals in an area completely skewed the concept of independence.
Compounding that was the fact that in the vast majority of those cases, Hyde overturned a recommendation from the planning inspector to deny permission.
Then there were the cases giving rise to possible conflicts of interest. One involved an appeal on planning for an extension in a domestic dwelling in the salubrious enclave of Sandymount in Dublin.
The problem with this was that the house in question was owned by his brother and sister-in-law. Hyde claims he did not know they were the owners when he sat in judgement.
And then there was the case that eventually opened the Pandora’s box.
He was one of the board members to sit in judgement on an application for a strategic housing development in Blackpool in Cork city.
The board turned down the application but Hyde never declared that he had a financial interest in a nearby holding of land which would have been affected if the development went ahead.
In April last year, The Ditch website broke the story about Blackpool. Hyde took leave soon after and eventually resigned from his position last July.
A senior counsel compiled a report on it and other matters for the housing minister, the results of which eventually found their way to the DPP. Last Tuesday, Hyde pleaded guilty to two sample charges, from a full complement of nine, for offences around conflicts of interest.
Last Monday, the reported on the departure of another controversial figure in An Bord Pleanála, director of planning Rachel Kenny.
She was never found to have committed wrongdoing but was the focus of an investigation over potential conflicts of interest.
The chair, Dave Walsh, resigned last November after the published details of an internal investigation that was highly critical of processes at the board.
The conviction and sentencing to prison of the board’s former deputy chair closes another chapter on controversies that engulfed the body over the last 15 months.