Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West I move amendment No. 2: In page 10, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following: “Report on impact of amendments related to alteration of existing planning permissions 4. The Minister shall lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas every 6 months from the commencement of this Act detailing the impact of the amendments to Part 4 of the Principal Act related to alterations of existing planning permissions and detailing the location, nature and volume of such alterations by project and local authority area and the resulting commencement of developments that have secured the alterations.”. The Minister of State has been in this House for long enough to know it is highly irregular for an amending deadline for Committee Stage to be held before the Second Stage debate. The reason we have Second Stage, Committee Stage, and Report and Final Stages is because we come into the Chamber, debate the Bill, and consider the matters in front of us. Having done that, we submit amendments which are ordinarily taken with detailed scrutiny in Committee where we can go through details of the legislation. That is the ordinary procedure. What the Minister of State did in this instance was to publish an 83-page Bill of highly technical changes to planning law on a Friday. I acknowledge we got a very good, detailed briefing from the Minister of State’s officials and we have thanked them for that but we had an amendment deadline at 11 a.m. on a Thursday before Second Stage. The Minister of State gave four hours for Second Stage but the really important part after the speeches is committee scrutiny of the legislation. The idea that somehow the Minister of State speaking to an empty Chamber at the end of four hours in any way negates the argument that giving us just two hours, not having had an adequate opportunity to submit amendments after Second Stage. is the norm is just not true. From my long experience in this House, when detailed, technical planning legislation entailing changes to our planning codes - including sections of this Bill that I fully support, because there are elements of this Bill in which the intention is absolutely fine – is introduced in a very rushed manner without adequate scrutiny, particularly Committee Stage scrutiny in this House, unintended consequences arise. We have had occasion after occasion of this in the past decade. Officials are put under undue pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines and the technical outworkings of the Bill are challenging. In the real world, the Bill then does not do what the Government said it would. That is a fact. This is a bad way to make legislation and if the Minister of State does not agree, it is something he needs to carefully consider because this will affect his constituents as much as it will mine. There are no votes to be got from technical discussions around planning legislation; I learned that a long time ago, but this stuff is really important and to do it in this way is the wrong way to do it. With respect to this amendment - and I want to pick up on the response to the last amendment - the Department is introducing a set of changes. This amendment relates to sections 62 and 63, which the Department hopes will result in an acceleration of apartment delivery. It is hoping to have an outcome but saying it is not its job to monitor whether the legislation has those outcomes but that of the Office of the Planning Regulator, the board, or whoever else. All we are saying is it is not unreasonable to ask the Department to track the impact of the legislation it passes to see if it has had the intended consequence or not. This amendment refers to the relevant sections. I apologise in advance if my technical proficiency is not as good as that of the Minister of State’s expert officials. These sections are meant to be about accelerating delivery of apartments. The Department is creating a facility whereby people who have planning permissions will be able to significantly alter them in line with new apartment design standards, which are not yet law themselves, in terms of the planning policy statement before the courts. All I am asking the Minister of State to do - I accept he cannot accept the amendment - is to take some responsibility for the changes he is proposing and monitor them. If they have the intended impact the Minister of State is saying he wants them to have, he can come into our committee and say “Opposition, you got it wrong. We told you it was a good idea and it was going to work and here is the evidence.” The real reason the Department does not want to track these things is not because they are somebody else's responsibility. It is because if it tracks them and reports them to the committee and if they do not have the intended consequence, we will highlight that the Government got it wrong. That is the real issue. I am not going to labour the point but I think the spirit of this amendment is one the Minister of State should endeavour to embrace, notwithstanding the fact that he opposes the letter of it. If not, we will continue to raise these matters and whether through freedom of information requests or parliamentary questions - which the Ceann Comhairle knows we are very persistent about - we will get the information one way or another. How about just a little bit of transparency, accountability and reporting to the Oireachtas committee, which is part of our function, whether this legislation has good consequences, no consequences or, as many of us fear, negative consequences, particularly for the people who will be affected by the changes in the 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/dail/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08