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1 8 September 2016
S
imon Coveney was born in Minane
Bridge, Cork in 1972. Scion of a
family of Cork’s rarefied merchant
bourgeoisie, Simon was one of six
children of Pauline and Hugh Cov
-
eney. Both his parents were Mayors of Cork and
his father, Hugh, Minister for Defence in 1994
before resigning the following year after he
leaked details of a Budget to the Evening
Herald, a class of sin which over subsequent
years has been deemed less and less venal.
Hugh was subsequently appointed a junior min-
ister in the Department of Finance with
responsibility for public expenditure.
Young Simon was educated locally in Cork
before later attending posh fee-paying Clon
-
gowes Wood College, County Kildare, an Irish
Eton for the agricultural classicist. These forma-
tive years were not easy for Coveney as he had
a "significant speech impediment" - a princely
stutter. In 2010 he told a cloying Miriam
O’Callaghan: “Literally until I was 15 or 16 year
of age, I could not string two or three sentences
together. I remember breaking pencils under
the desk in frustration when trying to read as
Gaeilge in Irish class”.
He was expelled from the college in Transi-
tion Year. He has told how, after already having
received a warning for drinking, he and some
friends absconded from school to attend a
party – it seems to have been the last straw for
the killjoy school. He completed his secondary
school education in Presentation Brothers Col-
lege, in Mardyke Cork, purdah for a dauphin.
Coveney subsequently studied Economics and
History in University College Cork but left after
a year for Gurteen Agricultural College, Tipper-
ary, before completing a BSc in Agriculture and
Land Management from the Royal Agricultural
College, Gloucestershire. “The college does
have an upper class image - the Queen is its
patron - but I didn't find it exclusive. Many of the
students are from regular farming backgrounds
and quite a number of Irish people go there”.
For his six months' work placement he was
attached to the Scottish Agricultural College,
near Edinburgh, which is the equivalent of Tea-
gasc. He also worked on the family farm in
Mallow.
He later told the Irish Times, “My background
- going into agriculture from an essentially
urban base, a rural-urban mix - is unusual and
will be an advantage”.
In 1997/8 he led the “Sail Chernobyl Project”
which involved sailing his late father’s boat
Golden Apple 30,000 miles around the world
and raising €650,000 for charity, without ever
getting his feet dirty. Charity was shaping up to
be Coveney’s thing, unless the family political
calling beckoned.
He married his long-time girlfriend Ruth
Furney, an IDA Ireland employee, in July 2008.
They have three daughters Jessica (6), Beth (5)
and Annalise (3). In 2014 he admitted that poli-
ticians' "obsession with votes" puts them at risk
of neglecting their own families.
An urbane and good-looking fellow, particu-
larly before his hair thinned, he is approachable,
good-natured and gregarious. A keen fan of all
competitive sport, he played rugby for Garry-
owen, Cork Constitution and Crosshaven Rugby
Club. He is a fully-qualified Sailing Instructor
and Life Guard. Coveney lives in Carragaline and
continues to be involved in the running of the
family farm. Simon’s even more orthodox
brother Patrick Coveney (45), the chief executive
of sandwich firm Greencore since 2008, earned
pre-tax income in 2014 of around €6.3m – 40
times more than his brother’s. Another brother,
Rory, currently serves as Strategic Advisor to the
Director General of RTÉ, Dee Forbes.
Coveney has served as Fine Gael (FG) TD for
Cork South-Central since 1998 as one of FG’s
youngest TDs when he won a bye-election fol-
lowing the death in unexplained circumstances
of his father, an Ansbacher Account holder, who
died after plunging from a cliff in Robert's Cove,
Co Cork. In March 1998 it became publicly
known that the Moriarty Tribunal had ques
-
tioned Coveney about whether he had a secret
offshore account. Ten days later, on 13 March
1998, Coveney visited his solicitor to change his
will. The next day, 14 March 1998, Coveney died
in a fall from a seaside cliff while out walking
alone. Simon insisted that his father had never
held an Ansbacher account. Though this was
inaccurate it is only fair to note that no impro-
priety was ever proved against Hugh Coveney.
It later emerged that Hugh Coveney had held
$175,000 on deposit in the secret Cayman
Island-based bank.
Coveney commented on his election win:
“I probably got elected on the back of a sympa-
thy vote if I’m honest”.
Coveney was elected to the European Parlia-
ment for the South constituency in the 2004
European Parliament election and held Shadow
Ministries in the areas of Drugs and Youth
Affairs, Communications, Marine and Natural
Resources, and Transport. He chaired the FG
Policy Development Committee before the 2011
General Election and is seen to be a policy poly-
glot, though no innovator.
During his forgettable three years as an MEP,
Coveney was a member of the Foreign Affairs
Committee and in June 2005 became the co-
ordinator for Human Rights, for the largest
No more
broken pencils
Time for Coveney to assert himself
with some public-interest policies
by Michael Smith
Clongowes
If the history of strategies
in Ireland is any yardstick,
we should not get too
carried away about
Rebuilding Ireland actually
ever being implemented
NEWS
September 2016 1 9
Urbane and
good-looking he
is approachable,
good-natured and
gregarious
(and so is Simon)
Leadership favourites ahoy
2 0 September 2016
political group in the European Parliament, the
EPP-ED. He was also author of the European
Parliament's Annual Report on Human Rights in
the World 2004. He returned to national politics
in 2007.
In June 2010, Coveney and a number of other
front-bench glitterati stated that they had no
confidence in their underpowered party leader,
Enda Kenny. Fellow Cork TD Jim O'Keeffe sug-
gested Coveney could be a compromise
successor. Following a blistering takeout driven
by Big Phil Hogan, a confidence motion in the
leader was won. Coveney made a confusing call
for party unity and was re-appointed to the
front bench as spokesperson on Transport.
In March 2011 he became Minister for Agricul-
ture, Food and the Marine in Enda Kenny's
coalition government dealing solidly enough
with debacles such as the horse-meat scandal
in 2013. Though apparently a passionate
believer in the need to address the reality of cli-
mate change – the Jesuits don’t do climate
deniers, Coveney was a patsy for the IFA’s suc-
cessful campaign to expand the Irish dairy herd
by over 300,000 cows over five years, “while
maintaining the existing carbon footprint of the
agriculture sector” – a nonsense, he must have
well known. To defend the environmental sell-
out Coveney claimed that higher yields per
animal would somehow magically offset the
massive increase in our national herd.
This definitively suggests that Coveney will
pander to important vested interests despite
the ethical pull of noblesse oblige, if it is expe-
dient – and he can get away with it politically:
no idealist this suave dynast.
Just as bad, Coveney was
accused of supporting big
earners under the Single Farm
Payment at the expense of
smaller farmers with low
Single Farm Payments (SFP)
farmers with low payments
sacrificing themselves to sup-
port farmers in the east of the
country with big payments.
Coveney was also appointed
as Minister for Defence as
part of a cabinet reshuffle in
2014. He published a bullish
White Paper which proposed
"developing relationships"
with the foreign and security
aims of "the EU, OSCE and NATO Partnerships for
Peace".
Coveney attended a meeting of the Bilder-
berg Group in Copenhagen in 2014. An internet
video shows him being shown around by an
avuncular if harassed Peter Sutherland to
whom he is duly deferential. He was appointed
Campaign Director for the referendums on EU
Stability and Marraige Equality.
Delegated by Kenny as one of three
negotiators with Independents following
2016’s uncertain election result Coveney
countered Leo Varadkar’s impolitic denial
of the feasibility of a Fianna Fáil minority
administration. He became the new Min-
ister for Housing, Planning and Local
Government in May 2016.
Early in his tenure in the new job he put
through legislation to suspend inflamma-
tory water charges for nine months, though
his choice of the superannuated if allegedly
safe Joe O’Toole to chair a committee looking at
alternatives backfired when the former Labour
Senator attacked the regressive approach of
the left to the charges, and had to be carted off
the field. He also had to sort out the mess over
changes to domestic waste charges, managing
to put it all off for a year, almost as if he didn’t
care about the principle here either.
Writing in the Irish Independent he has said
his priorities include to:
•
Comprehensively address the homelessness
issue;
•
arrest the growing affordability gap for many
households looking for housing;
•
drive the rental sector towards providing a
range of quality accommodation;
• deliver housing in a way that supports, and
does not direct, economic growth; and
•
achieve wider objectives, such as the need to
support proper planning and the creation of
sustainable communities across the entire
country that people want to live and work in.
Inheriting the Housing Department from mav-
erick Alan Kelly, Simon Coveney is faced with
the biggest challenges facing the government
today - of a hous-
ing shortage and
homelessness.
Now the almost
biblical 100 days’
set for what every-
one in FG said
would be publica-
tion of the most
ambitious action
plan for housing in
the history of the
state has passed
and a report that
the media deemed exciting – belatedly - pub-
lished, it’s appropriate to look at what he’s
actually planning to do.
After he pointedly recognised that there was
a housing emergency Coveney undertook to
produce a housing plan within 100 days of
taking office. Though he missed his own dead-
line, his €5bn Action Plan for Housing and
Homelessness was, he claimed, a “really ambi-
tious and far-reaching initiative by Government
to provide homes for people” over the next five
years or so. The “multi-stranded, action-ori-
ented approach” includes several new
initiatives to tackle the twin problems of home-
lessness and lack of affordability by prioritising
social housing, making it more attractive to
rent (rather than buy) housing and identifying
sites in State ownership where mixed-tenure
housing estates could be built in the short to
medium term. There is nothing in the plan that
seems to reflect any special insight from Cov-
eney himself and he seems to be mouthing the
views of his senior civil servants whose imagi-
nation for good planning has always been
circumscribed by an incapacity to value quality
rather than quantity, to favour the public over
the vested private interest. There is no sign he
intends to reverse Alan Kelly’s plan to reduce
the minimum size for apartments, a measure
which serves primarily developers and fails to
recognise the obvious overhang of apartments
of a quality much worse than that in most West-
ern European capitals.
The Departmental plan aims to increase con-
struction to at least 25,000 new homes a year
by 2020. In 1997 housing output was 90,000
units so in itself that may not secure Coveney’s
legacy. Indeed IBEC which seems superglued
to the Departmental ear prognosticates a popu-
lation explosion – and why wouldn't it? In its
part-Maxol-sponsored report, ‘Connected: A
Prosperous Island of 10 million people’ (July
2016) it predicted a 100% increase in the coun-
try’s population by 2050.
Gavin Daly, a Luxembourg-based planning
researcher, comments: “if the history of strate-
gies in Ireland is any yardstick, we should not
get too carried away about Rebuilding Ireland
actually ever being implemented and it will
most likely remain just a paper strategy. All of
the targets in it seem hopelessly optimistic and
the funding proposals tenuous. It is interesting,
however, that its publication was uncritically
welcomed by pretty much everyone from the
Construction Industry Federation to the Peter
McVerry Trust – for in the teeth of a ‘crisis’ who
could be against a housing strategy?”. Daly
considers the anti-negativity mantra is to be
Though apparently a
passionate believer in the
need to address the reality
of climate change Coveney
was a patsy for the IFA’s
successful campaign to
expand the Irish dairy herd
by over 300,000 cows
Priorities include to comprehensively
address the homelessness issue
NEWS
September 2016 2 1
the trump card of lobby groups such as the Con-
struction Industry Federation (CIF) – “to
position their vested interests as an illusory
societal interest. The Irish Planning Institute,
not an organisation given to mounting robust
defences against planning scapegoating, were
among the few to release an insipid statement
expressing ‘concern’. However, there are very
good reasons to be vigilant about the prevailing
anti-planning rhetoric and the ‘root and branch’
review of planning proposed by Coveney”.
Reflecting his Cork bias, Coveney has encour-
agingly volunteered that cities outside Dublin
should "double" to counterbalance Dublin
though there is no strategy to address this or
any indication that the Minister is equipped to
outmanoeuvre his Greater Dublin-focussed
advisors. Coveney has never offered an opinion
on the one-off-housing epidemic.
Simon Coveney has said taller apartment
blocks need to be built in Dublin city centre to
address housing shortages and prevent subur-
ban sprawl. Coveney has told Dublin City Council
to revert to Council Chief Executive Owen
Keegan’s proposed heights.
Keegan wanted to set 28m as the maximum
height for low-rise apartments in the city centre
- the same as for office blocks - and 16m for sub-
urban apartments.
Coveney said he and his department were
“uncomfortable” with the “restrictions” some
councillors were advocating.
IBEC has ventilated about this and its chief
executive, who does not labour under the
burden of any planning qualifications, asserts:
“At a time of acute housing and commercial
space shortages, it is crazy that tougher and
unreasonable height restrictions are being pro-
posed in the current draft plan”. But the plan is
already loosening not toughening standards so
the premise which grounds all the noise from
IBEC is untruthful.
The problem is that Dublin doesn’t need to
sacrifice its unique aesthetic selling point, a
marvellous human scale, to pack in more
houses, in the interests of good planning.
An audit carried out by the Department of the
Environment 2010 found 3,302 hectares of unde-
veloped residential zoned land existed within
the four Dublin local authorities. Gavin Daly
notes that even with conservative residential
densities of 35 units per hectare, this was suffi-
cient for at least 115,000 new homes. Within the
adjoining Greater Dublin Area (GDA) counties of
Kildare, Meath and Wicklow there was a further
4,120 hectares. Most, if not all, of this land was
initially zoned in the late 1990s and early 2000s
and remained undeveloped throughout the
Celtic Tiger period. For example, Daly notes, the
220-hectare Adamstown site in South Dublin
was originally zoned in 2001 and was intended
to provide 9,950 homes via a ‘fast-track’ plan-
ning scheme approved in 2003.
Similarly, large greenfield tracts of land at Car-
rickmines, Clongriffin, Pelletstown, Phoenix
Park Racecourse and Hansfield were all zoned
well over a decade ago and remain undeveloped
or only partially complete. The figures above are
exclusive of the abundant supply of brownfield
development land, infill sites and mixed-use zon-
ings readily available throughout Dublin and
which could potentially have provided for tens of
thousands of additional new homes.They also
omit the potential of the extended Dublin
Docklands.
Moreover the Minister, who should know
better from a cursory glance at the professional
comment, carries on as though there were no
distinction between high density (usually a
planning good – because more easily served by
public infrastructure) and high-rise (more con-
troversial in planning terms, at least in a fragile
historic city centre).
According to Gavin Daly who writes more inci-
sively about Irish planning than any other
commentator: “Rule 1 of the neoliberal play
-
book – when faced with a construction crisis, is
to attack the planning system! It has been ever
so since Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s environ-
ment secretary in the 1980s, launched his
broadside against the “jobs locked up in the
dusty filing cabinets of planning departments”.
Of course, it matters little whether there is any
evidence that the planning system is indeed sti-
fling construction – the ideology demands that
planning regulation remains firmly in the cross-
hairs. As Michael Gunder puts it – planning is
“the chief remaining scapegoat of neoliberal
governance”, a convenient patsy for contempo-
rary policy failures.
Simon Coveney has bought unquestioningly
into the schlock. His policy promises a ‘root and
branch’ review of the planning system. A head-
line element of the strategy is to speed-up the
planning process by allowing large housing
applications of a hundred units or more to be
made directly to An Bord Pleanála. This is pro-
posed as a temporary measure for four years
since: “with almost all planning approvals of
larger housing developments for 100 new
homes or more being appealed to An Bord
Pleanála, this has meant that there is in effect a
two-stage planning application process which
can take 18 to 24 months to secure ultimate
approval to go on site and start to build”. (p 62).
Daly notes: “Of course, no evidence is pre-
sented to support this assertion. Indeed, An
Bord Pleanála’s own annual report, published
states that: “The number of appeal cases for
housing developments received over the past
two years has remained low, 35 cases of 30+
units in 2014 versus the peak of 568 in 2007.
While the number of 30+ housing appeals
received has increased slightly (60 to the end of
2015), the number of such cases remains
low.” (p 35). All of these appeals, according to
An Bord Pleanála, have been disposed of within
the statutory compliance time of eighteen
weeks.
Coveney's high-rise diktat may encourage developments like this old proposal for Dublin's O'Connell St
Nothing in the plan seems
to reflect any special
insight from Coveney and
he seems to be mouthing
the views of civil servants
whose imagination is
circumscribed by an
incapacity to value quality
rather than quantity
Cork: no Ministerial growth strategy
2 2 September 2016
NEWS
Daly goes on: “The reality is that permission
is currently in place for 27,000 shovel-ready
homes in Dublin alone. According to the strat-
egy, just 4,809 or 18% of these potential units
are currently under active construction i.e. 82%
of potential homes with planning permission
are not commenced at all. The planning system
is clearly not the impediment here. The strategy
even includes a proposal that the lifetime of
these extant planning permissions be extended
further. Daly notes that this would mean that
often poor quality and poorly located Celtic
Tiger era housing could still be constructed up
to 2021. Furthermore, according to the Residen-
tial Land Availability Survey, there is enough
zoned land to provide for 16 years of new hous-
ing supply based on an annual projected
requirement of 25,000 units”.
In order to maximise the efficiency of the pro-
cess under the new system, the strategy
proposes that An Bord Pleanála will be required
to make a decision within eighteen weeks and
will only be able to seek requests for further
information or to hold oral hearings in “excep-
tional circumstances”. For local authorities’
own development under Part VIII (social hous-
ing, roads, community facilities etc), the whole
process is to be streamlined to a maximum of
twenty weeks. Daly emphasises that proposals
for major housing developments and other
infrastructure are complex undertakings which
are irreversible and shape places and commu-
nities for generations. Daly says that “the idea
that adequate consideration could be given to
such proposals, while fulfilling all require-
ments pursuant to EU and national law, within
these compressed timeframes and without
recourse to seeking further environmental or
technical information or giving adequate con-
sideration to local concerns or right of appeal,
is a recipe for yet another great planning dis-
aster”. While the need to intensify use of
vacant space in town centres is paramount,
“the proposal in the strategy to exempt from
planning permission residential development
over shops and commercial units also seems
neither sensible nor workable”.
Over the past five years, the government has
shown scant interest in implementing the cru-
cial regulatory reforms recommended by
the Mahon Tribunal and has consistently shown
de-regulatory tendencies.
There is no indication that Coveney is consid-
ering appointing the independent planning
regulator the Tribunal called for. Completely
absent from his strategy are any measures to
provide a pro-active role for planning in deliver-
ing housing and other infrastructure – like
ensuring local authorities are staffed with the
requisite range of planners and other expertise.
It is perhaps the greatest indictment of the
impotence of the state that, in a Circular Letter
issued by Coveney after publication of the strat-
egy, the so called ‘active land management’
measures involve politely asking developers to
sell their lands to housing providers and, if not,
local authorities should identify alterna-
tive lands elsewhere. Absent, according to
Daly, is the one measure, favoured by most
commentators that could actually release
hoarded zoned and serviced land into produc-
tive use, re-invigorate under-utilised town
centre properties and simultaneously contrib-
ute to the finances of broke local authorities – a
site-value tax. Instead, the state has once again
capitulated to the development lobby and opted
to subsidise developers through a new infra-
structure fund, abolition of windfall taxes on
sale of zoned lands, reduced development
contribution levies, much weakened Part V
social housing requirements and lowered
apartment standards. Daly might have added
that the 1974 Kenny Report’s recommendation
that local authorities buy building land at cur-
rent use values (plus 20%) is nowhere on the
agenda for this unradical government.
In 2010 Miriam O’Callaghan asked Simon if he
would like to be leader of Fine Gael: “I am very
ambitious so the straight answer is yes, some-
day. But I am personally very loyal to Enda and
he knows that. I think he will be the next Taoise-
ach and I want to try to help him in any way I can
to get there”. Two years later he and another
Clongowes boy, Richard Bruton, attempted to
shaft the leader. It has been a slow journey back
but in Fine Gael he is viewed as the safest pair
of hands of them all, and – to his advantage – a
blue blood. However, like his perceived rival (in
fact Frances Fitzgerald is the likely winner of any
contest), Leo Varadkar, another good public per-
former, he has achieved nothing that any
non-partisan would remember in his time in pol-
itics, so far. Coveney's contribution to FG is more
rural, (even) more royal, and less youthful than
that of Varadkar, who is seven years his junior.
It is unclear if Coveney has the imagination or
the mettle to deliver real change, real quality of
life. He has certainly been given a brief that
allows it and provides ample opportunity to
shine short-term too.
The Irish Times can’t get enough of Coveney
for some reason. A 2016 election profile
claimed: “Serious, hardworking and ambitious,
he is not a populist politician”. In August Harry
Magee apparently arbitrarily adjudicated him
highest among ministers for their post-election
performance. Noting his rivalry with Leo Varad
-
kar for the Fine Gael leadership when Enda
Kenny retires, he noted that “Coveney has been
by far the busiest Minister since taking on Hous-
ing and Local Government”. But being busy
won’t be enough.
Coveney has left little legacy and in his heart
knows that there is no point in being a Brahmin
if you pander to time-serving mediocrities like
his civil servants and grubby gombeens like the
Irish Farmers Association, the Construction
Industry Federation and IBEC. In opposition and
as an MEP Coveney made few waves. In Agricul-
ture he will be remembered as the man who
exempted Irish Agriculture from international
climate standards.
After all this country has been through over
the last generation in terms of poor and badly-
sited construction, will he be remembered as the
under-inquisitive Minister who consigned post-
collapse Irish planning to the developers?
Gavin Daly's article 'Rebuilding Ireland -
Implications for planning' which grounded
part of this article appears in
irelandafternama.wordpress.com
He shows no interest in
radical measures like a site-
value tax, implementation
of the Kenny report or even
introducing the Mahon-
Tribunal-recommended
independent planning
regulator
Recommendations largely ignored
