Planning and the legal system in Ireland

I don't have time for a longer reply, but:

the Irish model of starting with a field and not selling anything until there are finished houses forces all build costs onto the one entity (the developer).

How can you sell anything (or at least get paid for it) until houses are finished? They don't wait until all houses are finished either. They sell them piecemeal as they are finished.

On the continent, there are “land developers” and “house builders” who split this task. The former buys the site, obtains the planning and then arranges for all necessary services to be in place. They then sell the serviced site to a house builder, who can start construction immediately. This significantly lowers the risk, which reduces the need to engage in speculation to recover previous losses.

But, the same thing can happen here too. Developers (sometimes the original landowner) gets planning permission and consents from Irish water etc. Then sells to a builder who builds. The "builder" may be another developer who is only getting the finance and taking the risk, but brings in an actual contractor to do the work. The point is that there's nothing in our system stopping this from happening. But, I fear that there are other problems in our system which are not allowing the above to be profitable.

If it's the case, that the only developers making money are the bigger guys who assembled sites over long periods (and who are being maligned as speculators) then attacking this part of the building system is attacking the one part that is actually working and delivering houses sustainably.

I've always been sceptical of this idea that housing is being drip-fed to maximise speculative profit. A much simpler explanation for the lack of progress is the lack of capacity (building workers and infrastructure primarily, finance also maybe). Why would any business with an unproductive asset that could be made productive, not use it immediately, unless there are other constraints preventing that?

I completely agree that splitting the site development and house building “can” happen here. My point was that in the vast majority of cases, it does not. Subcontracting the building to a third party, which is fairly common, isn’t the same thing, as the developer is still paying for both preparation and house building.

“Drip feeding” does happen - completion of small developments happens slowly, but it’s often a function of developers not having the capital to complete ahead of time, and so the buyers who shout loudest about delivery get prioritised.

That’s a big part of my argument: our problems are as much about capital as labour and materials. Much of our country’s housing stock is built by small developers who lack the financial ability to have more than one site on the go at a time - you even see relatively small developments broken into phases where the second doesn’t even progress until the first is completely sold.

Here’s an unpopular opinion (it’s one I myself find uncomfortable to accept): “property developers” are not all rich, and may need financial support if we want to fix this problem. Yes, they have a lot of money by the standards of other occupations, but the business as it is in Ireland operates on high stakes: it requires huge amounts of capital to be locked up for a year or more at a time, in the hope of a profit. If the market plateaus (let alone falls!) while you’re building a hundred houses on the expectation of pricing trends to continue, then you can end up with no profit, or even no business - this is what happened in 2010/2011, and the loss of these small housing developers is a big part of the reason we’re in the mess we are, relying on REITs and other large builders who are uninterested in the small-site developments that we also need.

I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I don't think it's an idea that scales very well. Individual plots presumably means detached houses. So, not high density and using individual builders wouldn't be very efficient (easily €4000+ / sq m in Dublin).

I see there is a piece in the IT today that references a "take down" (link below) of the Collison article by a UCD academic - not Orla Hegarty, which mentions the Progress Ireland think tank partly funded by Collison. I haven't read all of it but I can see how they've really been triggered by the Collison piece, and it explains the hostility towards that guy Sean on the podcast.

The impression I get is that the planners are taking great umbrage that other people and bodies, with views that differ from the generally left of centre think-tanks that we already have, need to be "taken down". Why not just engage with their ideas? Nobody has to agree with them.

https://elajucd.com/2025/11/21/on-environmental-democracy-and-collisons-abundance-verse/

To add one thing. As that fella Sean said on the podcast, there probably is a lot more agreement between the likes of him (and Collison) with planners than some want to acknowledge. They seem to be in favour of Metrolink. They bemoaned the judicial review that the Dublin drainage project is going through. I think these people believe in the common good over individual rights. They just differ in how best to achieve it.

I read the first few paragraphs of the blog and it's depressing how a blog on land use planning, gets so caught up in US politics, name-checking the likes of Elon Musk, and all kinds of other libertarians, and tech-bros. WTF has any of that got to do with planning policy here? Linking all these people with Collison and dismissing his opinions as a result, is a bit small minded imo.

He's a billionaire (on its own enough to be dismissed by some), but he's also a property developer, having built his company's HQ in Dublin. So, he has a perspective. Not down in the weeds in the minutiae of planning rules (eg the spiral ramps at Dublin Airport), but he has a contribution to the bigger picture to make imo.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Higher costs and bigger delays all round.

I’ll repeat the last sentence of my post, as you may have accidentally hit reply before reading it:

Planning isn’t GBH, but the choices are the same: lose protection for the sake of expediency, or knuckle down and properly fund the system we have.

Incidentally, you’re not “allowed to build things” - it is illegal in this country to build a structure over a certain size without planning permission. Try it, and you could end up with a large fine, a spell in prison, and the structure demolished too. In legal terms, I was comparing criminal law with criminal law, because breach of planning laws is a criminal offence in Ireland (summary here: Planning Enforcement - Irish Legal Guide).

We have a planning system that’s too slow. The fix is to make it more efficient, not to weaken it.

@PeadarCo Your point is incorrect. Planning is not a civil law matter; violation of planning law is a criminal offence.

I didn't say we needed to "strengthen" our system, I said we need to "fund" our system. The laws we have are strong enough, but it takes too long to get an application processed. That's a staffing issue, not a legal one.

So yes, let's treat it like Covid, and spend large amounts to mobilise more staff to deal with the problem we have. No laws need to be changed.

Building without planning and assault are comparable in that both of them are against the law and both are subject to criminal prosecution. Your proposal was basically to water down the law because the law is too costly to enforce. The assault example was me applying that same solution to another area of our legal system where there’s a backlog to illustrate the problem with this principle when applied to offences against the person, a part of the law that you (I assume) want to be as strong as possible. The point is that we have laws for a reason, even the laws that you think are too restrictive, and we don’t loosen or abandon them just because it’s inconvenient to put in the effort to make them work. This is not Collinson et al’s solution, because no businessman would ever advocate spending more on regulation. You’re not going to hear the tech dudes proposing this, but that’s them, and this problem doesn’t affect them the way it affects the average person. As a general rule when some big business guy gives policy advice, you should be sceptical: we aren’t billionaires, and we should remember that their goals do not align well with what the average person in the street wants. (I am also sceptical when politicians do the same, by the way)

“The biggest problem with the current planning system is that it favours existing home owners over people who don't own their own home.”

You’re going to have to give us an idea of what you mean here.

It's not particularly comparable though because it does not really address reverse moral cost of enforcing these laws.

Enforcing a law saying you can't clock a person in the street has fairly limited downside, with only upside.

Having an extremely rigorous planning system has the upside in that the limited amount of units you build, likely will be of standard quality, however the reverse side is that you build far fewer houses, resulting in more homelessness, more xenophobia, and a growing illiberal public for relatively understandable reasons. Adding further and further planning regs isn't costless and isn't a neutral act.

Now, this isn't to say that you should abandon all planning regs and let developers do whatever they like. However you can't pretend that the current system is faultless and simply funding it more would fix all of our problems.

On the IT podcast, I thought there were some interesting alternative ideas thrown out. One example is something done in France, where land is zoned with predefined conditions of what can be built in an area set out, and the developers can then go ahead and build to those standards. For low level stuff like housing extensions etc, I think this is fine and would be a good way of clearing out the backlog of cases, so that bigger cases can be better resourced.