Planning and the legal system in Ireland

This is a very important point about the opium portion.

It's not black and white - good planning vs bad planning. That is too simplistic. I've seen some submissions from his ilk and they are pure nimby. Minor naming errors or typos and delaying the projects has a major negative effect on the environment.

Media doesn't capture this dark side, they cover the cases he should take, but not the litany of nonsense his ilk stoop down to.

Well the solution then is to fix the environment legislation if it is “not fit for purpose” (I dislike this expression - it’s a fancy way of saying “I don’t like it” usually without reasoning) and not to try to find ways to deny citizens access to the legal system when the government or a government agency does something which is against the law. The law is the law and everyone whether private citizen, corporation or government body is accountable to it and also protected by it.

And environmental regulations here and elsewhere are not fit for purpose because blocking and delaying so much development, including green infrastructure, is not particularly net beneficial to the environment.

This is all a bit vague - "so much development" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

What are there - 40 thousand odd planning applications made every year? And ABP or ACP or whatever get through 3 or 4 thousand? What proportion are you claiming are unduly delayed or rejected due to environmental legislation? How does it compare with previous years or other jurisdictions? Are the outcomes better or worse now than in the past when such regulations didn't exist and building on floodplains, destroying historical monuments or sites of importance in terms of nature was legal? Or was this a price worth paying for quicker development?

Before dismissing "environmental regulations" in their entirety, you should be able to answer fundamental questions like these? There's a pretty big difference between situations where, say 1% or 2% of cases are unduly blocked/delayed and say where more than half are and different responses are called for.

Also when I hear someone claim that "X in Ireland is not fit for purpose", I ask why they rarely give a concrete example of a country which have figured out how to do X better.

I'm not defending the planning/legal system in Ireland here (I'm not that crazy) but I find myself doing so because much of the blanket criticism seems vague and unsupported by anything except feelings and impressions.

The planning is airtight but in favour of a complainant or objector.

Outraged as I am about malicious objectors I don't fully blame them. They are being enabled by a system that puts projects on hold for years. If the judicial system made targeted decisions that held up projects for insignificant time I believe many of these objections would dissappear.

If you know you can only have a project amended or not held up - the spurious claims will be pointless and we'd (hopefully) be left with genuine cases.

The Warren Buffet quote comes to mind.

"If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket"

We have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of rules, laws, regulations and policies to help us with good planning. People like Sweetnam are ambulance chasers. Comb through a planning application and find a technicality. Get paid for it. A nice business model but its costing the state in millions if not billions in delayed projects.