Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will get to that. That was the second point the Minister of State made. It is interesting that the Government now says it does not anticipate any reduction in the number of judicial reviews. In some sense, that tallies with the legal opinions received by this committee that the Bill is likely to increase the number.

The Minister of State spoke about quicker processing times. I will ask a simple question. What was the average processing time of a planning-related judicial review in the past year or two? On average, how much time will the measures the Minister of State has set out and tried to justify in the Bill knock off that? How much time will we save by, for example, deleting the leave stage? The public and the committee have a right to know whether there is analysis that shows it has taken X amount of time in the past 12 to 24 months and that these changes will reduce that time on average. That is what we were told about SHDs, but it did not work out that way.

Is that analysis there? Is it a kind of guess that if we get rid of the leave stage, between the jigs and the reels, the processing time may be shorter? Is there something hard and concrete to tell us, as the Minister of State said, that the status quois not sustainable and is taking this amount of time on average but, under the new and improved, whiter than whiter regime, it will save this amount of time? That is the kind of analysis we are looking for.

The Minister of State referred to costs. He indicated that we will have no idea what those might look like for another three months. Will he tell us, as explicitly as possible, what the cost regime and the legal aid system will be like? There is currently no clarity or certainty for anybody with respect to that. The Minister of State is asking us to take a punt in faith to dispense with the clarity provided by the Heather Hill case and, again, I am not saying that is perfect and could not be reformed, for a regime that has yet to be actually decided, defined or costed.