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‘ brains they’d be dangerous’ has
been a reasonable, if wry, reaction to the his-
tory of land-use planning in Ireland, except in
this case the deficit has been not so much intel-
ligence, as land. This, however, is possibly about
to change. Much NAMA speculation presup-
poses that a lot of loans will fail and that the
sites or buildings against which defaulted loans
were secured, will be repossessed en masse. It
also presupposes that the Agency will begin to
develop these lands in an attempt to realise their
full value instead of letting them be sold in what
is perceived to be a depressed market. If these
suppositions materialise, the resulting night-
mare will expose the two fundamental property
vulnerabilities of planning in Ireland: the inad-
equacy of the land-use planning system, and the
poor track record of property development by
public agencies. So what exactly is wrong with
planning and public development in Ireland?
While it may not be recognised in Village’s edi-
torial policy, the most serious underlying plan-
ning problem in Ireland is that it assumes that
planning laws and practices from the UK, the
Netherlands or Scandinavia can be impoRted
and successfully applied here. But patterns of
land ownership, property law, a constitution,
demography and the absence of a long-estab-
lished urban culture all make Ireland a pro-
foundly different place in which to plan. The
land-use differences in other European coun-
tries, for instance, have nothing to do with
planning. Helsinki’s chief planner, for exam-
ple, doesn’t have to persuade a developer to
allow a new tram-line across part of his new
hotel site, because she owns the city and devel-
opers merely lease sites. This reluctance to
accept the reality that Ireland is different has
led to professional planners crudely attempt-
ing to enforce European solutions in Ireland.
This leads to the second and third fatal under-
lying assumptions that make Irish planning so
unpopular, irrelevant and unsuccessful.
Professional planners in Ireland, at all lev-
els from national plans to village plans are
engaged in a large-scale programme of forced
urbanisation on the basis that only concen-
trations of population and urbanisation can
provide a better use of infrastructure, quality
of life and environmental protection as they
have in many other countries. Despite pay-
ing lip-service to the need for rural regenera-
tion, no Irish development plans have specific
proactive policies for housing in the country-
side: instead, all have prohibitions and restric-
tions. The planner is therefore constantly in
an adversarial role, fighting the local council-
lor, the public and the rural community, and
consequently sending planning into disrepute.
Unscrupulous, profit-oriented property devel-
opers often use this resentment to generate
Planning
Balanced regional development is outdated since the demography
demands new housing and facilities along the eastern seaboard.
l o r c a n s i r r a n d c o n o r s k e h a n
Should be easier
village_oct_09.indd 67 27/10/2009 15:39:43
— November - December 2009
support for their large-scale – and now often
empty – rural developments.
What Irish land-use planning cannot achieve
by consensus it will attempt by force, and
when the market refuses to urbanise in spite of
numerous plans insisting on the need to ‘nucle-
ate’ housing in villages and towns, then other
means are needed to show some successes.
Unfortunately, the only group which they can
encourage to do their will is those who have no
choice, and all over Ireland the failure of plan-
ning policies to strengthen towns and villages
has been disguised by directing every new
local authority scheme into the nearest town
or village. The result is a concentration of the
underprivileged in smaller rural settlements,
stigmatising them as desirable locations for
those in the community wanting to better
their prospects. Those with get-up-and-go
do exactly that. They go out to the country.
This seldom-discussed self-inflicted wound of
social apartheid lies at the root of the failure of
much of Irish planning.
There is also a belief that prescriptive-
ness will overcome market sentiment, prac-
tical reality or commercial necessity. ‘Build
it and they’ll come’ think the planners as
they seek to ‘regenerate’ areas with inap-
propriate mixes of uses that they hope will
create jobs by merely building shop or office
units. The failure of these well-intentioned
but poorly planned interventions is visible
now as a boarded-up blight in every urban
renewal-designated town and neighbour-
hood. The , vacant houses (not holi-
day homes) in Ireland are enough to fill every
seat in Croke Park over . times. Leitrim has
the highest number at .% of stock with
over € billion worth of unoccupied hous-
ing; Dublin the lowest at .%. The figures
speak for themselves. Worryingly, with the
average house price in Ireland at €,
(as of July ), that puts the – albeit theo-
retical – value of unoccupied houses in Ireland
at c.€. billion.
The clientist nature of both local and national
political activity is a serious problem for plan-
ning in Ireland, because it creates a deep resist-
ance to the cornerstones of good planning. It is
made worse by an essentially administrative
planning system which tends to emphasise
where not to put things, rather than a creative,
forward-looking positive approach that is una-
fraid to make clear commitments to support
and develop specific uses in specific places.
Clientist political supervision tends to want to
avoid specifics that might omit or offend a con-
stituent, but this creates an intense vulnerabil-
ity to the special pleadings of interest groups
– especially well resourced monopolists whose
demands are often at variance from those of
the public good. Also significant are the rural
origins of the two largest parties in the State,
a heritage which has produced national plan-
ning and development policies that have a pro-
nounced pro-rural, anti-urban bias. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the National
Spatial Strategy [NSS], a document originally
for guidance and co-ordination purposes,
which is increasingly being used in a highly
prescriptive manner to force local and county
development plans to adopt population targets
set solely by the Department of Environment,
Heritage and Local Government. The NSS aims
to achieve ‘balanced regional development’,
an outdated planning concept that is used as
window dressing for ‘Anywhere-but-Dublin’
policies which are in complete denial of the
overwhelming evidence that both the existing
and future bulk of Ireland’s population and
associated economic activity are based along
the eastern part of the country [see Brian
Hughes’ informative paper at http://www.
regional-studies-assoc.ac.uk/events//
apr-leuven/papers/Hughes.pdf]. The Draft
Gateway and Hub Population Targets issued
on October st “…envisages rates of growth in
Gateways between - of at least .
times (%) the growth rate of their respec-
tive regions”. Ironically, or predictably, only
% growth is targeted for Dublin, Ireland’s
capital of urbanisation and driver of the econ-
omy. A thriving eastern seaboard is not wish-
ful thinking, it is an economic necessity
Finally, there is a profound misunderstand-
ing in the public sector about the risks and
returns of property development. Property
development for profit is not for the faint of
heart. It requires flexibility, speed, decisive-
ness, efficiency, expertise and sustained appli-
cations of determination and energy, and it is
the nature of public agencies – not necessar-
ily the individuals – to be slow, unresponsive,
autocratic, uncompetitive, expensive and
inefficient. Typically public developments fol-
low a trajectory of initial apparent successes
fuelled by subsidised management, monopo-
listic legal/fiscal protection and often a free/
cheap land-bank. Inefficiencies and unprofita-
bility emerge much later. What reason is there
to believe that NAMA will be any different?
Sites which will become available through
NAMA are also likely to do so in a relatively ran-
dom pattern of locations, sizes and uses offer-
ing no opportunities for any form of coherent
or effective planning. Furthermore, planning
authorities at local and national level will prob-
ably feel themselves under pressure to take
account of NAMA when making future decisions
for over-valued lands controlled by the Agency.
It will be interesting to see if NAMA will now
officially take up where developers left off by
attempting to undermine the already weak plan-
ning system and maximising the value of unsuit-
able, unzoned and unserviced lands through
over-development or contravening zoning. The
poor track-record of Irish planning as a proactive
and visionary force coupled with that of the pub-
lic sector’s record as property developers should
give policy-makers and the electorate plenty to
mull over. Another aspect of NAMA to worry
about, as if there wasn’t enough already.
Conor Skehan is an architect and landscape architect
and Head of the Dept of Environment and Planning,
Dublin Institute of Technology. Dr Lorcan Sirr is a
chaRtered planning and development surveyor and lecturer
in real estate in the Dublin Institute of Technology.
“professional planners in ireland, at all
levels from national plans to village plans
are engaged in a large-scale programme of
forced urbanisation”
Planning
village_oct_09.indd 68 27/10/2009 15:39:43
