Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-14
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

This is not my amendment but it is a very sensible one. The question of the placing of it is really by the by. That is a product of the fact that this legislation is being pushed through Committee and Remaining Stages, as have ten out of 11 planning Bills in the last decade. Every planning Bill except one has been guillotined in the Seanad in the last week of July or the last week of December.
The technicalities of placement are exactly what Committee and Report Stage are meant to be about. Fundamentally, the suggestion of independence and so forth rings a little hollow because we have listened for years to direct attacks on judicial reviews, to the vilification of those who take them, and to comments showing an unwillingness to engage with any of the figures and facts. For example, the Library and Research Service has found that 40% of judicial reviews were taken by developers. You would not think that from the vilification of local communities when they or others, including environmental groups, take judicial reviews. You would not think, for example, that much of the major backlog that existed related to bad, rushed planning decisions in previously rushed planning and development Bills, including the strategic housing development provisions, which fast-tracked planning and led to a whole pile of planning permissions being given in ways that completely abandoned proper process. Even when they were granted, they were not built on because there was no use-it-or-lose-it clause.
Given the level of assault on democracy and access to justice that has been shoved through in planning Bill after planning Bill on the basis of a narrative that judicial reviews are terrible, including the dilution of people's ability to take them, the capping of the moneys and the dilution of locus standi , it is very reasonable for somebody to ask for the facts and their publication, and to ask for a justification for these ongoing erosions of judicial review powers and the public's access to justice.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:15+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-14