Government to hit ‘nuclear button’ granting itself emergency powers to solve infrastructure crisis

don’t think planning is an obstacle for hospitals considering the Gov seems to only want to close them down.

just wondering what happened to the government's proposal to allow planning exemptions for modular houses.

Good..remember the emergency powers they gave themselves to remove all our civil liberties. I do.

2020-2022

Very good. The picture in that article is the sewage treatment plant that's been held up in the courts / ABP since 2019! Total joke.

Spending more money on lawyers is not a solution.

You make plenty of good points and I fully agree that the JR's are being abused by NIMBY's, but to your primary question of "to what extent should we better resource ACP and courts" my answer would be "personnel gaps have long been identified in ACP and courts and it's not alone not being resolved, but it's barely being discussed". We have apparently had a shortage of somewhere between 40-110 judges over a period of several years but we're prioritising legislation change. We had ACP - already of dubious efficiency - see their work list massively increase through sending all sorts of "HoUsInG" schemes through them as a kind of fast-track...with fairly obvious knock-on results.

So I don't agree with you that "no matter what amount of resources are given…" because we have never actually given them the resources they needed, and simultaneously have been increasing their workload.

Right. I'm sure there's a thread somewhere that we can both go to, where we can both agree that the legal profession in Ireland are the cause of a lot of inefficiency and poor behaviours but this thread's not the right place for it. I'm talking about court backlogs which generally aren't a result of too little money being spent on lawyers. You're presenting a straw man argument.

Back to my first point, we've apparently identified JR's as a high priority problem area but it looks to me like a it will have unintended consequences which will create new problems, and that significant original problems will remain. For instance I'd be very confident that private developments will be added to the "strategic" list, for instance Port of Cork's new proposed "private" N8 signalised interchange. But this will subsequently result in other kinds of challenge.

Yes this is the point I'm trying to make too. I'm not sure it will help the situation and think it could cause other new problems.

It seems like the top identified priority is to reduce court backlogs which is good. But they also make a leap to "an alarming number of cases" without also quantifying whether the number of projects going through planning has increased. Maybe their conclusions are sound, but it really reads like they started from a baseline of "our legislation is more forgiving to objectors than the EU average" and built everything around that.

It looks like the planned actions are to water down legislation, lobby the EU to reduce legislation further and then incentivise private developers to things get built sooner (by reducing infrastructure blockages). There is literally no mention in the document of judge or court staffing, and you can see clearly on page 34 (figure 4) that staffing in ACP only really increased in the last 2 years, which would have obviously resulted in more cases coming through and more associated JR's. I agree we need to fix the courts backlog but it's not clear to me that reducing the quantity of cases is actually the top priority solution.

Separately, I hate to agree with David McWilliams on this one but it seems to me like the same private developers we're trying to incentivise to deliver housing are already very incentivised to NOT erode demand to any degree by increasing their product availability. I really don't expect these changes to result in more housing, which should be everyone's top priority goal.