Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-14
============================================================

Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel

To save time I will speak to sections 61 and 62 together because it is the same point. We feel that both sections will allow developers who have planning permission to request an alteration to their permission based on inferior design standards, which we do not agree with. It is not necessarily going to make units of apartments smaller but it will change rules around communal spaces and the amount of natural light that they have to let in. We feel it will make the apartments inferior compared with what the developers were originally granted planning permission for, without any submissions being allowed because it is an alteration. To flip it the other way, imagine if the wind energy guidelines were released tomorrow and they showed that the wind turbines that had been put up over the last two or three years were actually too high compared with what we are now saying they should be. I cannot imagine that any developer would say, "We'll look for an alteration and we'll make the turbines smaller." If a developer has planning permission, we do not believe they should be able to go back in time and get an alteration to use the new plans.

---

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/2026-07-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:15+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-14