Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2025-07-15 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel I will be opposing amendment No. 32 because it relates to amendment No. 47 on the modification of existing permissions. On amendment No. 47, Professor Orla Hegarty has talked about poor-quality accommodation and its impact on mental health and well-being in many recent articles, specifically in relation to the proposals the Government has put forward. On the one hand, people are talking about the actual implications of living in these places. They are the size of two or three car parking spaces. They are small. They are effectively boxes. While I recognise that there might be a lot of people in their 30s who are willing and desperate to get out of the family home, it will not be possible to have a partner or child while living in these conditions where the only spare room is the bathroom. People might be sitting on the loo to try to get some personal space. I nicked that from Senator Boyhan. I am sorry, in case he was hoping to make that point. However, it sparked the idea that when people want to get some space from their partners or maybe they have children, they will not have another room other than the bathroom or shower. That is no way to live in the long term. We risk people being forced into these homes for the long term, that they will not be starter homes, although the idea of the starter home is kind of nonsense in this day and age in the Irish housing market. We will see people moving into places like this at extortionate rents. Who are the people we envisage will live in these places? Most people want to enter into long-term relationships. They might want to get married or have children. How could anyone live long term in these places? The Minister of State will say this is just a starter home and that people will move out but that is not the reality of the current housing market. At the same time, legal experts are flagging the multiple serious legal flaws in the proposals. The proposals will not only affect the quality of housing to be delivered but risk compromising existing valid planning permissions. Developers will apply for these modifications, which will leave them open to judicial review because of multiple serious legal flaws in the proposals in the first place. These kinds of developments will leave a lasting legacy and be the slums of the future, providing a poor quality of life for the people who live in them. They will be considered to be boxes and have a negative-equity legacy, given the narrative about how they started. People will therefore not want to move into them, certainly not for the long term, because of the poor accommodation in the developments. It is likely the people who have bought them will not be able to sell them and trade up after living there for a while. That might not be possible. They might not be able to use these as a step on the so-called property ladder, because of the negative-equity legacy that might be attached to them, when more desirable properties come onto the market. I imagine this is a legacy the Government and the Minister of State's Department do not particularly want to have, given the emphasis on stimulating the housing market. I will not be supporting this amendment. I urge the Government and the Minister of State to withdraw it, although I do not believe that will be the case. I will speak briefly on my amendments Nos. 3, 5 and 6 to amendment No. 47. As Senator Higgins said, this is an attempt to mitigate the negative impact. I expect the Minister of State will not accept these amendments, but if he were to, they would not go any way to resolve all the challenges of amendment No. 47. They are just an acknowledgement of the grave implications of amendment No. 47 and an attempt to mitigate them in some way. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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