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

All those requirements the Minister of State has set out are just information on what the Government plans to do with the extension. There is not anything there which asks why the person is looking for this extension or why the planning permission has not been used to date. There is nothing there which acts as a discouragement in any way to future land hoarding, hoarding of planning permission or engagement in speculation around the exchange or trading of land with planning permission on it, rather than the use of planning permission to actually deliver on housing.
What the Minister of State is telling us is it does not matter why someone did not build and nor does it matter if the reasons someone may not have built were speculative and solely profit-based. Again, the idea is these are beyond the control of the applicant. Basically, the Government will reward you with an extension. It is effectively saying the normal planning permission lines do not have any basis because everyone can get an extension for planning permission and they do not have to show a valid reason why they did not act to date.
By doing so, the Government is effectively massively extending the duration of planning permissions which again, brings us into all those other issues around proper accountability and the potential need for a new public consultation and so forth. This is yet again another giveaway and reward for those who have actively watched a housing crisis develop, have sat on planning permissions, have chosen not to use them and waited it out in order to extract further concessions from the Government. The Government has been doing this since I entered this House back when we had strategic housing developments brought through, which did not work. It has been constantly diluting standards and the requirements for any kind of accountability. This would then wait two more years to dilute them further, rather than any form of stick or pressure on people to at least be able to show why they have delayed. I would like to ask all those developers who have been sitting on active planning permissions with no obstacles relating to connections to infrastructure or anything else, with no judicial reviews hanging over them, why they have not been acting and building. That is the kind of thing the Government should be asking them when giving these extensions.

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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