Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2025-07-15
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

In June 2022, the Irish Independent reported the then director of Savills Ireland as saying local authorities around the greater Dublin area, that is the four local authorities in Dublin county, and those in Kildare, Wicklow and Meath, had in response to the national planning framework changed their previous county development plans to reduce zoned lands by enough land to build 100,000 houses That is how the national planning framework actually works. In the greater Dublin area the affect of the NPF four years ago was to persuade local authorities to reduce the amount of land available for development by enough land to build 100,000 houses. That was done because the NPF envisaged that development would take place outside the city of Dublin and the greater Dublin commuter belt area.
However, where people want to live and where they are told by the national planning framework, NPF, they ought to live are two different things. The local authorities in question would not have dezoned all that land if it were not for the NPF and the supervisory function of the national Planning Regulator, which effectively cajoled them into dezoning land for 100,000 houses. We wonder why we have a housing crisis. That is the reason, as 100,000 houses could have been built on the land that was dezoned under the second last set of development plans.
When we introduce this hierarchy of criteria, as the Minister mentioned earlier in the debate, and it is then policed by the Planning Regulator, the result is, as the director of Savills outlined, a reduction of 100,000 housing places in the area where the greatest demand exists. It was done in the hope that people would go to live in other places and that increased zoning in those other places would attract them out of the greater Dublin area. It is no wonder we have a crisis. The crisis originated from the complete failure of the mechanisms we put in place under the planning Acts to deal with the growing population and the locations where people wish to work, live and bring up their families. We say that it is out of balance, but the people of Ireland vote with their feet. If they are given the choice, they want to live in areas where local authority members had previously made provision for them, taking a view of what was likely to happen in the property market by way of demand for housing. Effectively, we now have a situation where, on a hierarchical basis, local authorities remain capable of being told not to provide enough land in their areas for the requisite housing demand but to obey a different viewpoint, which is that the NPF knows better than the people who would come to live in those homes if they were built. I am sorry to say that those figures - 100,000 homes effectively taken off what was provided for under the second last set of development plans for the greater Dublin area, in pursuit of policies in the national planning framework at that time - are a major contributory factor in the cost of housing and availability of it where people want to live.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-07-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-07-15