Sir, – We spend a lot of time arguing about housing policy, yet one of the most basic structural problems rarely gets mentioned. Ireland has fully privatised land ownership, but we still rely on a planning system lifted from Britain’s 1947-48 Town and Country Planning Act – a system designed for a state that owned large amounts of land and could direct development in a top-down way.
We imported the rules without the machinery that made those rules workable.
At the same time, we kept an unusually strong attachment to private land. The State owns very little itself, and has limited scope to assemble sites or plan at scale.
So we are left with a contradiction: a country where land is overwhelmingly private, but development is governed by a planning framework designed for a very different model of land control.
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This mismatch explains much of the delay, conflict and frustration around housing. Until we confront that basic tension, our reforms will remain piecemeal. – Yours, etc,
CONOR GUBBINS,
Nenagh,
Co Tipperary.
