Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08
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Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

The Minister of State is just provoking me so I will allow myself to be provoked. The real issue is that if one apartment scheme is delivered but ten, 20 or 30 are delayed because they end up being litigated in the court because of these bad measures, that is not a measure of success. That is the problem here.
Let us also talk about studio size. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from all of us on this side of the House. If a residential development is to be a good development, it has to meet the needs of the community who will live there. That means we need an appropriate distribution of studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom homes in each development, in each neighbourhood and beyond that. In order for those to be good quality homes, dual aspect is not a luxury. There has to be the appropriate volume of dual aspect, storage and amenity. What this change facilitates in respect of the section 28 guidelines and the planning policy statement - whichever, if either, of them ultimately becomes law - is that it skews the standards that exist to allow an overconcentration of studio and one-bedroom homes, and it reduces the amount of storage space, dual aspect and other community amenity. That is the problem.
I would like to make another point about apartment design standards. When Irish Institutional Property produced a report on this some years ago, it compared our apartment design standards with those of other countries. It ignored that in many jurisdictions, there is far more public and amenity space which is part of people's living circumstances. Vienna is a good case in point. It is not just about apartments, but community facilities and amenities as well. That is something we struggle to do here in much of our public or private high-density developments. The argument just does not stand.

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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