Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

We can know it is July and nearly the end of term because we are seeing a planning and development Bill rushed through. It happens every single year. Others have spoken about how this is a bad way to produce legislation and how proper scrutiny is needed. Every time, we hear it is time-sensitive and urgent. It is not, because this happens every single year. It is because I had the feeling that I have been here every July looking at a massive planning Bill being pushed through that I went back and checked. Over the past ten years, of 11 planning and development Bills, ten haven been rushed through at the end of July or the end of December. Only one Bill was not pushed through in December or in the final week of July.
I should also note that there have been more planning and development Bills passed by Fine Gael-led Governments since 2011 than in the previous 50 years, and the entire situation has just been getting worse. If there were an epitome of failing to plan and planning to fail, it would be this. Either the Government intentionally plans every single year not to allow enough time to scrutinise planning and development legislation properly, so that it has to be rushed through, or it is failing to plan and inadvertently ending up in the same situation every year. It is literally a case of planning to fail or failing to plan.
As well as this rushed process being bad for democracy and bad for scrutiny, it leads to endless mistakes, amendments, adjustments, backtracking, fixes and attempted fixes, rolling around and moves, because the measures do not work, often do not add up and do not deliver what they promise. An example is the fact that in this legislation, and indeed in a previous Bill, it is stated that one of the proposed new sections, which is undermining apartment standards yet again, has regard to the acute shortage of residential accommodation in the State, the rise in homelessness in the State and the rise in the cost of residential rental accommodation and house and apartment purchase prices in the State. Let us think about that. This is our national planning and development legislation. It is meant to provide for planning and development. Not only is the Government failing to address the increases in homelessness, the cost of rental accommodation and the cost of houses and apartments, it is also putting these acute rises into legislation as matters to which regard must be had as if they were permanent facts like the weather, mountains or rivers. What an admission of failure it is to insert this.
When can we anticipate a planning and development Act that removes the statements of the assumed facts that there are a shortage of residential accommodation and a rise in homelessness? Does the Minister of State believe these assumed facts can be removed in planning legislation in 2027, 2028 and 2029? It is so extraordinary that these statements have been included. They are being inserted alongside more of the approach that has been tried time and again, namely to give developers anything they can dream of. That approach has failed to deliver.
For years, we had special measures such as capital gains tax waivers and strategic housing developments. It was always about how to fast-track and how to tie the hands of the public and concerned citizens further behind their backs so that they could not challenge decisions and so bringing judicial reviews would become impossible for them, though not for developers, who, by the way, take 40% of judicial reviews.
There is a little reveal in the new legislation because it mentions the significant number of apartments that have received planning permission but have not been commenced. The fact is that they are not delayed because of planning issues or because of judicial reviews. The fact is that there is a huge amount of residential development and apartment construction with planning permission that has not commenced. Those developments are under no pressure to proceed because the Government has, again and again, declined to insert use-it-or-lose-it clauses into planning law and to ensure that the many fast-track processes actually result in delivery. That is what we looked for when strategic housing developments were permitted but were not getting built.
In the 2025 Act, passed a year ago and in which apartment sizes were first reduced, the language used was that the relevant section was "to facilitate and encourage expedited construction of greater numbers of dwellings in apartment complexes than permitted under permissions already granted".
Now, the language in this Bill is that the purpose is "to enable the construction of greater numbers of dwellings". The word “expedited” is gone. That is because it does not expedite it. The Government’s lowering of the standards has, in fact, encouraged delays in the system. If somebody had planning permission for 40 apartments and the standards were lowered, and then there is a new planning process for maybe 55 one-bedroom apartments with a single aspect, or for studios, the person would be able to squeeze that bit more in.
Often, people just keep selling it on because it is now a planning permission that is worth more. With some of these planning permissions, the Government is creating things that can be sold as speculative products without ever being built. Why would developers build when they know that if they wait just one year until the following July, the Government will come along again and give them something else? Wait another year and it will lower the standards more. Wait another year and it will remove another piece of that process. Wait another year and it will chip away at something else and give developers another little percentage of profit. That is what happens every July.
I would like to get the figures from the Minister of State on the number of planning permissions for apartments and other large residential developments that have not been commenced. We should be putting that on the record. I also note that in those statements, the rise in homelessness, the rise in the cost to the State and the acute shortage of residential accommodation in the State are seen as core assumptions, and they are treated as fact in this Bill. There is actually a question mark about some of that. We know there are hundreds of thousands of unused spaces. Reports show that up to 75% of short-term lets are lying empty most of the time. There are 17,000 people in emergency accommodation, and there were 4.2 million bed spaces available last January, with fewer than 200,000 of them being used. Therefore, we have unused spaces.
I also have questions about some of the removals with regard to the vacant sites Act. We need to ensure that any existing liabilities of those who should have paid but did not pay, or who should have been fined but were not fined, would still stand. I would appreciate it if the Minister of State elaborated on that.
We have a massive problem with vacancy. Back in 2017, with Civil Engagement Group colleagues, including Grace O'Sullivan from the Green Party, we tried to get the Government to clamp down on vacant sites. That was almost nine years ago. It has been slow, slow, slow crawling towards doing anything meaningful in terms of a hard measure against vacancy. Similarly, we asked the Government to put “use it or lose it” on planning permissions for these large and mega projects, but it did not. That is why we have all of these planning permissions that have not commenced.
We have all listened to the extensive demonising of anybody who takes a judicial review, including communities and residents. From the other side, I want to acknowledge something that everybody is concerned about, which is the erosion of the powers of city councils and county councils. Councillors’ powers have been chipped away. We are told that they are the problem or that others are the problem. There is the occasional dog whistle that tries to use demographics as the problem. At some point, we need to think that maybe Fine Gael's approach to housing is the problem, and that it needs to try to listen to some of the better ideas that are coming through, not just bring us back every single July, with the same story writ again.

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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