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

I will be brief. I am just speaking to section 61. It relates to section 62 and I will then come to my specific amendments on section 62 when we get to that. I want to highlight that sections 61 and 62 together are amending the definition of "material alteration". Effectively, they are bypassing public participation, which is a crucial point when it comes to decision making. It is yet another thread in the dilution and evasion of proper public democratic participation in planning. There are huge implications to this in terms of our obligations under the Aarhus Convention, specifically Article 6.10, which Ireland is a party to and which is a key part of the EU legal order. The upshot is that, actually rather than speeding anything up, existing lawful positions will now potentially be rendered unlawful and drowned in legal uncertainty because things that have secured planning permission that then go ahead to have these material alterations in them that have legal ambiguity over them will actually be super-counterproductive. I have other problems when we come to section 62 that I will highlight, including the lack of proper use it or lose it clauses, including the actual specific quality and dangers and things like that appalling idea of single aspect apartments and the creation of hotboxes.
Those are specifics but because I am now speaking to section 61 I want to highlight the legal issues which are crystal clear. The Minister of State cannot say he is not aware of them, because Chapter 5, Part 4 of the principal Act, the relevant one here, is the one Chapter of the Planning and Development Act 2024 which has already been put on the desk of the Aarhus Convention compliance committee. Even following the final version of the Chapter following Report and Final Stages in the Seanad - the version that went into law in terms of material alteration - the Aarhus Convention compliance committee rejected it as non-compliant in early November 2025, which is contained in paragraph 44.102 of that decision by the convention committee. It has already been decided that it is not compliant and now the Minister of State will drag more things into it. Instead of fixing the issues in our now annual July rush through planning and development Bills, it could have been a chance to maybe fix some of the known problems. Instead of fixing them, we are actually compounding the issues of non-compliance with Aarhus, Article 6.10 and public participation requirements with further changes.
In many cases, existing planning permissions have not been acted upon because there are no use-it-or-lose-it clauses attached to them, many fast-tracking measures apply, there is a dilution of standards and we have all the rest of the things the Government does in its annual giveaway in the rushed planning and development Bills that are brought forward every July. I will discuss this further when we reach my amendments to section 62. Planning permissions, for speculative reasons, are not being used because developers know that if they wait a few months, the Government will give them something else. There comes a point at which those permissions may be compromised by legal uncertainty, become vulnerable to judicial review in a way they previously were not and risk being quashed for known non-compliance with the Aarhus Convention, thereby sending the whole project back to the drawing board. This measure will end up leading to slower and more convoluted delivery of lower-standard apartments. That may not concern a speculator who is just trading in the potential and is not actually planning to build but it is a very worrying situation for members of the public waiting for projects to be built.

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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