The calamity of the Planning and Development Act 2024 is becoming clearer by the day. Most people are not aware that the Bill for the Act was rushed through the Houses of the Oireachtas using guillotine motions to prevent any real consideration of the measure as a whole or in detail.
Many amendments were tendered by the Government in the Seanad, never reached in debate or scrutiny, deemed to have been passed and waved through by the Dail as if they were amendments made after scrutiny in the Seanad.
The Act seems to create a single hierarchical basis for Irish planning and development based on the fanciful notion that a national planning strategy will be promulgated by Government, approved after a cursory fully-whipped debate in the Oireachtas, and laid down to be followed by local planning authorities in accordance with ministerial planning guidelines. Adherence to the strategy and guidelines will be policed by the Office of the Planning Regulator. In this way the Custom House reigns, as ever, supreme. Planning authorities and the commission are also obliged to conform to government policy.
Central to the folly of the Act is the role given to the newly re-branded planning commission, An Coimisiún Pleanála. Nobody has ever justified exactly why a single agency should be established in Ireland to determine in the last analysis disputes about every conceivable planning decision from the petty details of home extensions to the building of all our off-shore and on-shore wind farms, from data centres to motorways, from railways to underground metros, and everything else in between.
On top of that vast panoply of powers, the act gives the Commission a different role in approving or disapproving nearly every compulsory purchase order from road-widening to conservation to building entire new towns.
You might think that such an all-powerful agency would, perhaps, bring with it the prospect of rapid decision making and finality in the delivery of our built infrastructure. But you would be wrong.
Apart from the hideously sclerotic decision-making processes which precede planning applications and the role of the commission, we have the whole process of judicial review which is available to affected and dissatisfied persons and bodies who wish to challenge the outcome of the commission’s deliberations.
And so, we have the utterly dispiriting spectacle of a High Court judicial review being launched by Wild Ireland Defence in recent days against the decision to grant permission to Uisce Éireann to build a €1.3 billion Greater Dublin Drainage Scheme [GDD] to complement on the north side of the city the expanded sewage treatment works at Ringsend which are already at full capacity.
The scheme now made the subject of judicial review is intended to provide sewage services to north Dublin and parts of Kildare and Meath.
A planning application for the scheme was first made in 2018. That is seven years ago. Bear in mind that the hugely costly preparatory work for that application probably took at least three years, maybe five years before that .
So, ten or twelve years have already elapsed since the decision in principle to build this infrastructure. Its merits have been assessed and approved. And it now enters the Four Courts where it will be the subject of High Court and quite likely Court of Appeal scrutiny which might end within fifteen years of the original decision to construct it.
Construction, once started, was planned to be complete and operational by 2032, a further period of seven years. That would be more than twenty-two years after the decision to build. But that will now be postponed to accommodate the judicial review process.
With any luck, the scheme will survive judicial review and commence operation within a total timeframe of 25 years. That is modern Ireland for you.
This scheme we are told is “absolutely essential” to cater for the provision of new housing demand in north Dublin, East Kildare and Southeast Meath. The knock-on effects of our planning sclerosis are truly massive in social and economic terms.
And, as Uisce Éireann will tell you, all these plans to expand planned homebuilding in the greater Dublin area are equally and intimately dependant on the related issue of adequate water supply. Plans for the construction of a Shannon-Dublin water conduit have not even entered the detailed design or the planning process yet. Opposition to that development is currently being organised. Pencil it in for delivery in the 2040s at the earliest, if the GDD is anything to judge by.
But all is not lost. The Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, has plaintively appealed to the GDD objectors “not to object any further” on the basis that people are perhaps not “aware of the urgency of this”.
Rightly, he points out that “we do not have the luxury or the capacity for extended judicial review mechanisms any more”. Alas, we have yet again cemented that capacity and luxury into law.
We need – and are entitled to – radically different laws.