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

I will speak to amendment No. 35. Section 16 proposes a new subsection (1A) in section 42 of the 2000 Act, which is the section was found to be non-compliant by the Aarhus Convention's compliance committee. The affect of this new subsection is to allow for the extension of durations for uncommenced developments of one or more houses. The compliance committee has been very clear why there is a problem with it, but there is also a shift in policy in it that directly rewards developers for sitting on development permissions. These are developers with planning permissions who have been sitting on them for no good reason, allowing them to squeeze supply and drive up prices, facilitating them to extract more concessions and derogations and watering down of good planning from the Government, which is only too happy to do so.
Amendment No. 35 would require that the planning authority would be satisfied that there were substantial and valid reasons that prevented the commencement of development, which is crucial These are the developers who have their planning permission. They are sitting on their sites. The checks and balances, which were provided in a previous NAMA version of section 42 that has since been repealed, was that the developer would have to give a substantial and valid reason for not building.
We do not require that at all. To be clear, we are saying that people have got a planning permission they have not used and we do not care why they have not used it. We do not care if, for example, they have not used such permissions precisely because there are opportunistic benefits to not using them. The longer people do not use them, the more they can squeeze out of the Government because they have it waiting desperately for them to use their planning permissions. We are not even asking if they have a valid reason.
You hear a lot of reasoning like there was a judicial review, they were waiting for electricity supply or water but we are not looking for any reason like that. Is it not a fair and basic thing that we ask people who have been sitting on planning permissions to justify why they have not acted? We heard previously from Senator Boyhan how so few of those planning permissions are because of judicial reviews and instead, the majority of them are being sat on for other reasons. They could have been using their planning permissions, which they have during a housing crisis. They then look for an extension on that planning permission, which they may have only been using as an asset for selling or buying all of this land with potential money attached to it. If they are getting an extension on such planning permission, rather than asking for this justification the Government is saying that is fine; it will reward them. We will come to some of the other rewards that come later, namely, the dilution of standards for those who may have planning permission for apartments and have not built them. Yet another reward is the potential to gouge a little bit more money out and to lower the bar and the standards still further.
In this regard, I ask the Minister to accept this amendment. It is what we had in a previous version of the legislation, which stated the planning authority should be satisfied there were substantial and valid reasons which prevented the commencement of the development to date. Is that not a very basic bar?

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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