Rural Planning: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Pat Casey (FF), Labour Panel I welcome the Minister of State to the Seanad this afternoon. I thank him for the work he is doing on this, as well as my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Browne. I have spoken to the Minister at length about this. It is interesting that we are going back to what my constituency colleague - the former Minister, Dick Roche - did in 2005 when the last planning guidelines were published. We should be careful what we wish for. Sometimes guidelines do not bring us everything we want. I had some sight over a previous draft version in the last Government. Thankfully it did not see the light of day because it was an absolute disaster. I share the opinions of my colleague, Senator Flaherty, in relation to the qualification. I think the qualification is there in the national planning framework for social and economic need in areas under population pressure - they all qualify. Getting from qualification to planning permission is the problem. The word that has been used all the time is "inconsistency" and the lack of consistency. It is not just across different counties; it is actually within counties themselves. There will be inconsistencies in planning decisions. When you look at the qualification, then you look at landscape and at landscape characterisation. Then you look at whether it is family-owned land or land bought to buy a house. They all have impacts on a decision. The next one is traffic and then environment. I want to focus on the lack of consistency within the pre-planning process. I could walk into Wexford tomorrow morning and sit down with a planner and discuss my planning application. In Wicklow, I will submit an email and get sent a link to a document. I think we need consistency so rural people can sit down with a planner and go through everything they need to go through, namely, qualification, landscape, transport and environment, so that they know what they are getting into. I would like to speak about ribbon development and backland development. I do not understand ribbon development in a rural setting because you are creating an urban form of development in a rural setting. When you have five houses in a row, all equally backed 20 m from the roadside, it is like an urban landscape. Backland development is one of the greatest opportunities we have to locate rural houses which are not visible from the roadside. In my first six years in Wicklow County Council as a councillor, I never heard of an issue with backland development. All of a sudden, out of fecking nowhere - excuse the language - backland development became an issue, and any house that was in the backland was not permitted. I do not know where it came from. There are great opportunities for planned proper backland development that will actually hide our rural housing and not have any impact on the landscape. I am trying to hit on a few things because this is a broad issue. On that understanding of the complexities and inconsistencies, I can give several examples in Wicklow of planning permission decisions on the same day. One was a traditional house and the one beside it was elevated and a dormer. The traditional house was refused and the dormer was granted. It just did not make sense to the two people I had to ring. How did the others get it and they did not? There has to be some consistency. Not all of it should come from the national level. Our councillors have a role to play. Economic need in each county could be completely different. What economic need is should not be from a high level or national level. Flexibility is needed. I will mention what nobody has mentioned yet, namely, the power of section 140 that was taken away from our councillors. I mention that, not because I want to be nasty but because it was the only implement councillors had, when trying to negotiate with planners, which they could use as leverage to say a specific house should get planning permission. That power has been taken away from our councillors. I have used it on a few occasions for what I felt was genuine rural people building houses on their own land who were being refused because of some little technicality. The councillors have lost the use of that power, even as leverage. Something needs to come back to give councillors recognition of the work they do and give them some leverage so they can insist that a planner listens to them, because there are genuine rural people not getting planning while there are people using the system who do not qualify and are getting it. --- 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