Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2025-07-15 ============================================================ Victor Boyhan (IND), Agricultural Panel The previous speakers on this side of the House made a very good point. To go back to what Senator Murphy said on viability, we are worn out with this idea of viability. I have been around for a long time. I have served for two terms on the Oireachtas joint committee on housing, planning and local government. We constantly heard from developers and other representatives of the construction industry looking for changes and we kept giving them changes and modifications to issues around regulation and all of what I have said previously. The reality is that the private sector will not build unless it can sell the units. There is no huge demand. On the argument we hear time and again about the €50,000 to €100,000, no one has provided that information. The Minister of State might be able to provide us with that data. Where is the evidence on the finances to back it up? Does it stack up? There was no regulatory impact assessment of this Bill, as the Minister of State will be aware. Can he share with us the evidence that suggests that this will dramatically reduce costs, by €50,000 to €100,000? That is what the Government press statement said. I looked at it this morning. That is an important point. A councillor wrote to me this evening about the new design guidelines from last year, which were working quite well. However, she says that because no revised planning permission is required, the public will not have any say in respect of the revised structure and their input into the original planning permission will be set at naught. She then asked whether that can be legally sound. The Minister of State might consider it. To nail that point, this section is particularly interesting, as are all the proposed amendments to it that we have spoken about. I do not know what the Minister of State will say about the amendments that were debated a few moments ago, but is important that we nail the lie. Only 7,500 of the 50,000 unstarted units are held up in the judicial review process. That is the narrative people have decided to peddle outside the Oireachtas. The reality is different. I do not know how we can compel developers. There are all kinds of advantages. They have made cases for reduced planning levies and reduced public spaces and public realm. There comes a point where we have to stop and tell them either to deliver the houses or not. I am interested to hear what the Minister of State has to say, more so about the debate on the amendments. --- 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