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By Ronan Lyons. It is accepted by almost everybody that, in a city with Dublin’s geography, a home with a south or west aspect is preferable to one that faces north or east. Similarly, who could argue that having 60-square-metres to live in is better than 50? Everything else being equal, I think we’d all take those ten extra square metres any day. Unfortunately, everything is not equal. As anyone who has built a home or even just an extension will know, every extra square metre costs, in land, labour and materials. This is why homes across the world are smaller in city centres than on their fringes or rurally. People opt for location over size or other features like orientation. But what happens when that choice is taken away from them? This is the situation now facing Dublin’s residents since Dublin City Council (DCC) introduced new standards for developments in 2008. They exceed those that apply in the rest of the country, introduced by the Department of the Environment (DoE) in 2007 and bringing Ireland into line with our European peers. And they are standards councillors are vigorously defending, typically appealing to an argument along the lines of “we don’t want people living in shoeboxes”. At its heart, the new standards are an inversion of logic. The one place where smaller sizes can be justified due to the benefits of location, such as access to jobs or a wide array of consumption services, is the one place where new units have to be at least one quarter bigger than anywhere else in the country. If 50-square-metres is good enough for the citizens of Cork, Copenhagen or Cologne, why in Dublin is it a shoebox? In addition to forcing new units to be a minimum of one quarter bigger than elsewhere in Ireland, all apartments must come with a basement car-parking space, a lift and a stairwell shared with no more than one other unit, and dual aspect. Where dual aspect is not possible, DCC will not consider any north-facing apartments. Each of these makes sense in a world where basement car parks, lifts and extra space are free. But as soon as you accept that each of these things costs money, what you are doing is effectively discriminating against lower-income households. Whereas those on higher incomes can choose between older or newer dwellings, the prohibitive cost of building new units means that rents of new builds will be far beyond the means of those on below-average incomes. To see how DCC’s guidelines are anti-poor, let’s walk through the maths of building a unit in Dublin city. If we wanted to build a two-bed unit in Dublin today, it would have to be at least 85 square metres. Given Irish local authorities’ disdain for tall buildings, this means that the cost of any given site has to be split across a smaller number of units than would other be the case. So where an acre costs €7.5m, instead of a 76-square -metre unit costing roughly €100,000 in land, the 85sqm unit costs over €110,000 each. The requirement for a basement car-parking space per unit – rather than for every four units, where central or close to urban rail, as is standard elsewhere – imposes a per unit cost of €20,000, rather than €5,000. Similarly, the requirement for a lift for every two units, rather than every ten, not only adds huge extra costs but also reduces the amount of space left for units. Together with the size requirements, the lift/stair requirements add nearly €50,000 to the construction costs of a two-bedroom unit. On top of this are added the costs of finance and development levies. All told, these supplemental regulations, above and beyond the DoE’s well thought-out standards applied in 2007, raise the development cost of a two-bedroom unit from roughly €265,000 to €350,000. It is at this point that the developer’s profit is added in, typically a margin of 15%. (Thus an irony of these regulations is that, where viable, these new regulations mean greater per-unit profits in euro terms for developers!) Whereas 15% of €265,000 is €40,000, the same margin applied to the higher amount is over €50,000. So the final price, which includes VAT, of a two-bedroom unit in Dublin is currently €460,000, as opposed to €345,000 if the standards that apply elsewhere in Ireland applied in central Dublin. Translating this into the monthly rent required for a two-bed to be viable for an investor to buy (at a 6% yield) and thus for a developer to build in the first place, the rent for a Dublin two-bed would need to be €2,750 per month. Under DOE standards, the rent would need to be €2,050. Rents for two-beds in Dublin currently range from €1,150 in Dublin 9 to €1,650 in Dublin 4. What sort of income would you need to have to pay €2,750 a month on your rent? Accepted financial wisdom is that the highest fraction of your income to spend on housing that is sustainable is 35% of your disposable monthly income. A professional couple earning €120,000 gross per annum should not be spending more than €2,250 on housing costs per month. To afford a DCC-standard two-bedroom apartment, with its two balconies, its lift and basement car parking space, you would need to be earning €140,000 a year. Is it any wonder that nothing has been built in Dublin in the last few years? DCC’s regulations are effectively turning Dublin – or certainly its new developments – into an enclave for the wealthy. This is not to argue for a second that Dublin needs to allow shoddy construction and miserable accommodation. Far from it. There has been excellent value-creating regulation introduced in Ireland in recent years, including the focus on energy efficiency, while standards for things like green space and build quality all enhance quality of life and thus the value of a unit. The problem is that, in the rush to prevent another

By Tony Lowes. In last month’s Village James Nix outlined the – surprising to most – ways it is proposed to downgrade the environment in the new scheme of Commission Directorates and portfolios. But this overt change is less surprising when you consider the way the Commission has downgraded its enforcement of environment law over the last five years. The European Union cannot achieve its policy goals if environmental law is not applied effectively on the ground. While member states are primarily responsible for implementing EU law, the Commission’s duties as guardian of the EU Treaties include the responsibility to ensure the member states comply with the law, demanding – when necessary – resort to formal legal proceedings. Since the introduction of a new mechanism of complaint-handling by the European Commission in 2009, however, the formal infringement proceedings that once ensured (slow) progress of justice have been replaced by a system that has no basis in European law, offers no transparency to complainants or the public, and is settled in private between Commission officials and the offending member states representatives without ever reaching open court. It certainly amounts to an anti-democratic, anti-transparency move away from the personal rights of complainants to closed-door resolution of their complaints. It downgrades the rights of citizens in relation to the EU and national-government blocs. The Commission’s astonishing achievements in Ireland in beginning the end to rampant illegal dumping, kick-starting the clean up of our waste system, advancing water-quality and effluent control, designating 13% of the country for our shared EU role in protecting European biodiversity, ensuring major projects are (well, mostly) assessed for their impact before they were built, in even ending indiscriminate salmon drift net fishing at sea – all of these came from individual complaints from Ireland’s residents pursued systematically and formally by the Environmental Directorate’s Compliance Division. In the waste case (2005) alone, 13 separate complainants, all unknown to each other, had written to the Commission begging for the 1977 Waste Directive to save them from poisoned water, unbreathable air, and infestations of rats. Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan paid an indirect compliment to the Commission in the Dáil this March when patting himself on the back for reducing the number of infringement complaints from the 21 he had inherited to 7. He listed the diverse areas of the environment that the Commission has relentlessly pursued over the past decade: “In reducing the number of infringements, my Department has addressed compliance issues through, inter alia, a range of primary and secondary legislation across the broad spectrum of environmental areas such as water services, air quality, waste, energy performance in buildings and planning, as well as targeted measures to provide for consistent and transparent implementation of these legislative provisions” Sceptics will be quick to point to lacunae in transposition, implementation and particularly enforcement, but even the most critical would admit that Ireland’s environment would be unrecognisably worse today without this history of litigation. But the new system – called PILOT – has effectively brought an end to a decade of progress. Even in the promotional literature that the Commission provides it is clear what the PILOT system intended. Heralded as ‘A Europe of Results – Applying Community Law’ in 2007, the 2011 review puts it succinctly. PILOT is intended to “correct problems related to Member State compliance with EU law at an early stage by finding out-of-court settlements through the establishment of a partnership relationship between the European Commission and Member States”. The Commission’s 2013 Internal Market Scoreboard credited the introduction of PILOT for  a dramatic reduction of infringement proceedings across the EU, ranging from 25% for Greece, 38% for Spain, 37% for Italy, to 49% for Belgium. In fact, one of the first Irish PILOT cases was over the impact of farmed salmon on protected wild stocks. Opening in 2009, it was closed in 2012 but reopened when documents released under Access to Information showed that the Minister for Agriculture had denied holding and not provided one of the ‘express views’ sought in the original PILOT request – a Report from Inland Fisheries Ireland [IFI] on salmon farming’s impact on wild fish that in fact devastated the Department of Agriculture’s benign position. The file showed that after repeated written concerns the Commission had not received the “full Irish position on these matters”, Liam Cashman, the longstanding acting Head of the Compliance Unit, finally telephoned the EU Secretariat in the Department of Foreign Affairs in September 2010 and told them that unless the IFI Report was received, the Commission would have to “reserve the right to move the case to infringement proceedings”. The result was Cashman’s transfer out of the unit, a move that shocked many and left the Unit without the unparalleled professional skill that had led them to over a decade of successful ECJ proceedings that changed EU and national (including Irish) law and practice. A subsequent Irish Ombudsman’s investigation into why the Department had denied holding, and failed to pass on, these ‘express views’ found that the process is “quite informal and operates on a partnership basis between the Commission and Member States”. Ireland’s ‘Lead Department’, the sole voice allowed to enter responses in the on-line PILOT system, was the Department of Agriculture, whose agencies license and  promote fish farming – the subject of the complaint. IFI’s role is subsidiary  to that of the Minister for Communications and Natural Resources.  Though charged with protecting wild fish, it could not directly communicate their views to the Commission. Ireland’s Ombudsman accepted the Agriculture Department’s position that the IFI report would have had a “disastrous effect on Ireland’s reputation, containing serious inaccuracies, omissions of relevant facts, and misleading commentary”. In fact the Ombudsman praised the Department over its concern for Ireland’s reputation: “It cannot knowingly allow a Report that is inaccurate to be furnished to the Commission”. Since it had told the complainant that that “we did not consider any of the reports pertinent to sea lice because they did