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

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I want to pick up on that point. The removal of the word "expedite" is key because it exposes the logic. As I said, the logic has been the same. Every July, we get a new planning and development Bill that includes a new set of concessions to developers and creates more problems. We have tied the hands of the public in relation to their rights to judicial reviews and access to justice. The Government has blamed councillors and sought to erode their powers systematically. It has blamed the public and environmental groups for ever taking judicial reviews. The blame has been widely spread every year, but what happens every year is that the Government gives more concessions to developers and it does not deliver because the goals of developers, who are looking to maximise profit, and the goals that our public representatives, who are serving the public, and our Government should have are not directly aligned. The job of the Government is to hold developers and standards to account. It is to drive forward the provision of housing.
This language removal tells us a lot because it has gone from saying that we need to cut yet another corner to expedite the construction of greater numbers of dwellings and apartment complexes to saying we have to do it to make it happen because otherwise they will not build it. They want another thing. It is another pound of flesh from the public. This time the developers want to be sure that they can row ahead and put people into hot boxes with single-aspect windows. The Minister said it. They are not even going to increase the occupancy number. What they will be doing is changing the unit structures, cutting corners on public spaces and standards, and ensuring that what we do not have the mix that we should have in terms of family size and residences within these residential developments, as well as ensuring that the most profitable unit can be produced in the highest numbers with the highest profit margin. That is explicitly what it is doing. It is solely about enabling the construction of greater numbers of dwellings within residential developments.
It is just a lowering of the bar again. The bar cannot get much lower, but it is happening again, and this time the Government is bringing a legal complexity with it, and our amendment is a use-it-or-lose-it clause. This is basic.
If these developers have been sitting on planning permissions for two years, and if the Government, having lowered the bar for them last year, then gives them another sweetener this year, lowers the bar yet again in terms of what is deemed a material alteration and allows them to do that and they continue not to build, because that is the issue, then at a certain point there needs to be a stick and not just carrots. This is not anybody held up by judicial reviews, These are people with ready-to-go planning permissions who are not using them. There needs to be something that says that if developers have planning permissions and they are being granted concession after concession, even to the point of risking illegality, then they need to use them. If they do not use them, then the Government should start taking the sweeteners away and start saying that we cannot have a lowering of standards and continued non-delivery.
I will oppose section 62 as a whole because it is wrong, but if the Government is serious when it says that this is about delivering anything, the minimum it should do is introduce a use-it-or-lose-it clause - the kind of clause we looked for on strategic housing developments, where almost half of those developments with planning permission were never built. A use-it-or-lose-it clause needs to be part of the mix at this point in every new annual planning and development Bill.

---

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