Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09 ============================================================ Maria McCormack (SF), Labour Panel I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. This Bill comprises a long, technical and complex series of amendments to the Planning and Development Act 2024. It is unfortunate that it is being rushed through the Houses at breakneck speed and without proper scrutiny. It is a really bad way to make planning law and it likely will lead to errors, unintended consequences, legal challenges and delays to much-need infrastructure, housing and public services. There are aspects of the Bill to which Sinn Féin is not opposed but we have concerns about other aspects. It is genuinely regrettable that the Dáil and Seanad have not been given the appropriate time and space to properly scrutinise the legislation or hear from professional planners and public and private sector utilities and developers. This is the second time we are amending the planning legislation, despite being told that the 2024 Act was a once-in-a-generation measure that would sort all planning issues for the future. We support the move towards greater plan-making but the Minister should address the need for significant extra staffing for planning authorities. At the moment, the numbers just are not adequate. We support increasing the lending limit of the Housing Finance Agency but it needs to be accompanied by reform of the funding mechanisms for the approved housing body, AHB, sector. People in that sector are telling us this is the real issue. We must be sure financing does not restrict the ability of AHBs to get on with the provision of housing. There are real concerns that the changes to the judicial review process will lead to increased legal challenges and development delays. I hope that is not the case. It would have been better to be able to scrutinise the Bill properly in both Houses to try to work through those concerns. It is baffling that the proposal to create a new legal definition of material contravention has not been subject to any scrutiny by groups representing planners, such as the Irish Planning Institute or the local government sector. Sinn Féin cannot support the proposal to allow developers to amend their apartment planning permissions in line with new inferior apartment design standards. Simply put, the Government is supporting developers to make more profit. The Minister can talk about viability all he wants but, really, all he is doing is making these developments more profitable while reducing living standards. It will not help to increase supply or bring down prices. It is typical of a developer-led, private-market-led approach from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which, as we all know, is making this housing crisis worse. I want to make a final point about planning in general. The same issues arise time and again all over the country with every new development, especially in Laois. Housing estates are built, families move in and then there is a realisation that there is a deficit of services in the area. The population of Laois has increased significantly in recent years. Portlaoise is one of the fastest growing towns in the country. There has been a lot of private housing development, mostly concentrated in Portlaoise, but not enough planning around the delivery of sports and community facilities, especially for teenagers and families. The same applies to school places. We need to ensure that we are not just piling people into new houses and creating estates on the edges of towns with growing populations and not enough services. We have a GP shortage in Portlaoise. You simply cannot get a GP. We need good planning that encourages social and affordable homes. At the moment, the biggest issue is the lack of affordable housing in larger towns such as Portlaoise, but also in smaller rural towns. That brings me to my next point. While we see private estates popping up in larger towns such as Portlaoise, we also see how more rural towns and villages in Laois are being forgotten. They are not seeing enough development and they are dying. Shops and pubs are closing every week. We hear from the GAA, including at our committee, about how the imbalance in planning and development means that GAA clubs, and no doubt other sports clubs, do not have enough players or finances to keep going. A small rural village in Laois, The Swan, has a national school that is on the verge of closing because it just does not have enough pupils. In one part of Laois, the towns are being built up increasingly, while in the small rural villages GAA clubs are having to merge because they do not have enough players to keep going. The lack of proper planning for counties and towns around infrastructure and public services such as schools, playgrounds, health facilities and transport, and all of the things that make towns sustainable, needs to be given serious consideration. This would really help. We need to ensure that addressing these kinds of things is not an afterthought. What I have described is how things are done. It leads to great frustration in communities. When we talk about planning, we need to focus on balanced development. It is crucial to the survival of rural and country towns. --- 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/2026-07-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:11+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-09