Over the last few months, critics of housing and planning policy have emphasised the need for reform, using many of the current buzzwords: abundance, supply, efficiency.
But underpinning all the critiques and arguments is a common theme: a call for more deregulation.
We’ve seen how this plays out before. As the Government comes under pressure to “get things done” from the public and vested interests, critical rules and regulations are diluted or dispensed with.
What follows is a series of foreseeable and calamitous consequences. The order collapses. New rules are introduced and existing ones reinforced to make sure such outcomes can never occur again. But, over time, the reasons for these rules and the consequences of what went before are forgotten.
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Enter a new generation of lobbyists and commentators promoting the idea that there is too much regulation and that politicians need more power to “get things done”.
Politicians feel the heat and then begin the process of diluting or eliminating regulations all over again. As Willie Nelson put it, it’s all “circles and cycles, phases and stages, and scenes that we’ve all seen before”.
Deregulation and returning power directly to politicians is usually promoted by those who have not experienced its previous negative impacts – or occasionally those who stand to make lots of money from it.
Deregulation might seem like an obvious solution to those who don’t remember the Mahon tribunal into planning corruption or who didn’t lose their job or find themselves in negative equity following the financial crash when we experienced first-hand the effects of power and deregulation.
This culminated in over-indebted households, housing built on flood plains, ghost estates, tracker mortgage scandals, €64 billion bank bailouts, mass emigration, lower standards and firetrap developments.
Fianna Fáil should be especially cognisant of its history in the deregulation of Irish planning and housing policy and, by extension, wary of calls to give politicians more power to “get things done”.
The Mahon tribunal made 11 findings of corruption against councillors – six were named at the time, including four Fianna Fáil, one Fine Gael councillor and one Labour. It also found that former Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor, who resigned from the party in 2000, “conducted a personal business in the course of which he corruptly sold his expertise, knowledge and influence as a councillor and as a TD for personal financial reward”.
The establishment of An Bord Pleanála in 1977 came about partly because of a lack of transparency, accountability and independence in planning decisions. The lobbying register and its legislation had the same founding rationale 38 years later. And unarguably imperfect as some are, a country needs strong regulations to protect citizens from Liz Truss types who think the state should be a free market, let-it-rip, survival of the fittest, “elbows out”, free-for-all. (That did not end well for her.)
Just like Elon Musk’s DOGE (which was a private sector creation), Simon Coveney promised more efficiency when he deregulated the planning process to allow large planning applications to bypass local authorities and go straight to An Bord Pleanála (another industry suggestion). In both instances, the result was chaos, delays and tarnished reputations.
Judicial reviews are also in the crosshairs for delaying housing, with the Government’s new target-free housing plan referring to these as a “barrier”. It’s worth examining some of the claims made.
Pat Farrell of the lobby group Irish Institutional Property has suggested that “minor inconsistencies or technicalities should not be sufficient to derail projects that are in the public interest”. But what exactly is a minor technicality and where does it end? Providing a wrong address? Building houses in the space that had permission for a playground? Or not adequately fire-stopping new apartments? More delay as the courts decide.
Conor O’Connell, a Construction Industry Federation spokesman, said on RTÉ Radio that judicial reviews were being taken because a page was missing in an application. In reality, the judiciary need a good reason to grant an application for judicial review. O’Connell also said that developers always applied for development that was in line with development plans – yet An Coimisiún Pleanála recently refused planning for 580 apartments at St Anne’s Park in Raheny, Dublin, as the application “materially contravenes” the city council’s development plan.
But this narrative has been accepted without question. Taoiseach Micheál Martin thinks “everything is being JR-ed”. In an opinion piece in these pages, Sinéad O’Sullivan said that “invariably communities and the politicians who represent them vote to oppose density or take judicial reviews against every new development.”
In reality, according to figures quoted by Robin Mandal of the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance in a recent letter to The Irish Times, just 0.22 per cent of all planning permissions have been judicially reviewed since 2012. Of these, the State has won 21 per cent – losing, conceding or withdrawing the rest. This suggests the judicial reviews taken had good grounds.
Figures compiled by judicial review specialist solicitor Fred Logue show how in 2024 developers, landowners and public authorities took 32 per cent of all judicial reviews with the public taking 52 per cent. This year to date, developers, landowners and public authorities have taken 44 per cent of all such legal challenges, with the public taking 40 per cent. The public are taking far fewer judicial reviews as issues, mainly with Coveney’s “efficient” Strategic Housing Development process, have been remedied.
The Bar Council has said that “problems with infrastructural delays are not caused by the courts, but by failings in the decision-making processes of state bodies”. In the case of the Greater Dublin drainage scheme the planning authority failed in its basic legal obligation to get the opinion of the Environmental Protection Agency. If developers and state agencies followed the rules then there would be significantly fewer appeals and judicial reviews.
Pressure to curtail judicial reviews from a small but vocal sector of the development industry is a distraction from the real causes of delays: budgetary uncertainty; expensive and inconsistent government funding; lobbying, land banking and speculation; ministerial indecision; policy flip-flopping; regulatory capture and poor procurement policies.
A critical cause of delays is under-resourced local authorities, state agencies and the courts system. The Bar Council makes the point that judicial reviews don’t have to take as long as they do.
Politicians should be careful about what the lobbyists wish for – the latter’s cures often make things worse.
The planning system is a key part of democracy and the legal system is how citizens hold power to account. Tinker with them at your peril.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer in housing at Technological University Dublin
