Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08
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Rory Hearne (SD), Dublin North-West

It is.
There is a key concern that I outlined last week and we have outlined a number of times before. I wish to make a number of points on it. The first point is that this change is a result of intense lobbying by institutional investors and developers about this whole idea of viability. Viability is about profitability. Were the guidelines that existed prior to this good planning or bad planning? Were they guidelines that were about ensuring that people had liveable spaces and apartments were of decent design standard and liveable? Clearly, they were. The reason that the Government is making these changes is not to improve liveability of apartments. As the Minister of State said very clearly, it is actually about viability. What does viability mean? It means reducing cost, increasing the number of units that we can get on a site and reducing the quality of what has been delivered in terms of space, balconies, windows, etc.
Of course, the biggest critique of apartments that were built during the Celtic tiger - and people spoke about them - was that they were shoeboxes. After the Celtic tiger crash, we had the introduction of better guidelines that were about creating improved apartments that people would want to live in. However, what the Government is now doing is going back on that. We will back in the same situation, creating shoebox apartments that people do not want to live in long term and cannot live in long term. We are trying to support people to have families and go through different life stages. What these guidelines are going to do is make that more even difficult. As the Minister of State said, if this builds one more apartment, that is great and he will be happy about that. That is what this is about. However, it is not an apartment that it is building, it is a unit. It is not a home. Regarding who is going to be living in these, they will not be able to afford them. I have also heard that it is about trying to get more social housing units in. It is creating lower quality and standards of social housing. Again, this is adding to stigma. It is not actually building. We can say that we built a unit, but we need to be building affordable homes for people. This will not achieve that. It will build units. It will add to the numbers that are being built. It will give a roof over someone's head but is it building an actual home on a permanent basis? It is not going to be achieving that. It is essentially about incentivising and enabling institutional investors to get more profit. It will also add to land speculation and land prices. It will push that up and lead to further speculation and the use of planning to do that. It is not a measure that will provide decent homes for people. On that basis, I oppose it.

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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