Rural Planning: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Frances Black (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel The Minister of State is very welcome to the House. This is something he is very knowledgeable and passionate about. I welcome the publication of the new planning guidelines. If we are serious about planning reform, we must also be serious about the democratic structures through which planning decisions are made. On that front, the direction of travel gives cause for real concern. I say this not as a critic from the sidelines but as someone who served on the Seanad Public Consultation Committee on the future of local democracy that was chaired by our own Cathaoirleach, Senator Mark Daly. On that committee, we heard from councillors, communities, planning experts and citizens about what is actually happening on the ground. What we heard was consistent and damning. Local democracy in Ireland is being hollowed out, decision by decision, through secondary legislation that bypasses proper scrutiny. The Planning and Development Act 2024 is the latest chapter in that story. Since 2014, we have lost 678 elected local representatives. We went from 1,600 in 2007 to 949 people with a democratic mandate to speak for their communities. As the number of elected voices has shrunk, the power of unelected officials and central government agencies has grown. Our committee's research on local government functions from 1993 to 2024 documented this drift in meticulous detail. The replacement of section 28 ministerial guidelines with national planning statements, which all regional and local authorities must now follow, is the latest expression of this centralising logic. The Minister issues the statement. The council follows it. The councillors are watching. I welcome the Minister of State's commitment to reform and I share his concern about inconsistency across local authorities, but good planning policy and strong local democracy must go hand in hand. I urge him to ensure, in seeking greater consistency, that we do not inadvertently remove decision-making further from the communities it affects most. Development plans are an example. Under the new Act, development plans will have a ten-year lifespan instead of a six-year lifespan. The Minister will be able to issue urgent directions requiring change. That sounds like modernisation. What it actually means is that a community's vision for its own area, painstakingly negotiated through a democratic process, can be overriden by a Minister's direction from a desk in the Customs House. That is not planning reform; that is decision-making removed from the communities it affects most. Then there is the question of the reserved functions being stripped from elected councils. I refer, for example, to the section 183 function for disposal of council land to the Land Development Agency and the Part 8 function for councils' own housing developments. They were taken away quietly, without any fanfare or serious public debate. Our committee called for their immediate reinstatement. That call has not been answered. Why has it not happened? What is the argument for keeping elected councillors out of decisions about their own communities' land? Our report recommended also that councillors be given access to independent legal, financial and planning advice. At the moment, when a major planning application comes before a council, the developer arrives with a full legal team and experts in planning. The councillors who will vote on it have nothing equivalent. That is not a level playing field. It is a structural advantage built into the system for those with resources and it needs to change. I want to ask a straightforward question about the local democracy task force, which was the central recommendation of our report. The Government was supposed to convene it within three months of taking office. Has it been established? If not, the Minister of State should tell us today when it will be established. The public who engaged in that consultation and gave their time, expertise and experience deserve an answer. Planning affects everything. We know that. It affects where people live, what their towns look like, and whether their communities have green space or services or a future. These decisions should be made as close as possible to the people they affect by representatives those people can hold accountable. What we are building instead is a system where the big decisions are made centrally, the difficult ones are deferred to agencies and the councillor's role is increasingly ceremonial. That is not what I would consider planning reform; that is managed decline of local democracy and it has to stop. --- 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/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10