There is good and bad in the Government’s new planning laws, approved by the cabinet this week, but there is no doubt at where they are targeted from the point of view of all three Government parties: From a Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil perspective, parties for whom dealing with housing is the number one issue, what we are seeing is an undeclared war on so-called “NIMBYism”, which restricts the ability of local residents groups to take objections to the planning of new housing.
The most significant change requires residents associations to have a formal constitution, and to prove that a supermajority (two thirds) of their registered voting members approve of any decision to take a challenge to a planning application, or a planning decision.
In addition, residents groups will be more liable, on balance, for substantial costs when taking a judicial review of a planning decision than they were previously. And they will be more restricted in the arguments that they can make: Now if they want to claim that a particularly rare breed of mushroom or moth is at risk from a planning application, they will have to make that claim from the start: it cannot be introduced, as before, late in the process as something of a Hail Mary.
If these changes work as intended, they should see a meaningful increase in the number of new housing developments approved. That is the clear intention behind the legislation, and that is clearly good news for those struggling to get onto the housing ladder – even if it is not good news for those concerned that new developments in their area are unwelcome.
But with this Government, there is, as ever, a sting in the tail, because the Green Party had its own little agenda with the new laws.
As one might have expected from a Green Minister, environmental groups have an exception to everything laid out above.
For example, while residents groups must be just that – local residents – you will be permitted to submit an objection on environmental grounds to a planning application anywhere in the country, regardless of where you live yourself: A person in Wexford will be free to object to a house in Sligo, so long as their reasoning is based in protecting the environment, or maintaining Ireland’s climate change goals. This will be true even if no local environmentalists object to the proposal.
Further, unlike residents associations, environmentalists or environmental groups will be free to submit objections at any stage of the process, and will not be tied to their original arguments, like local residents will be. Further, environmentalists will benefit from a special scheme that allows them to object, lose, and still have their costs paid – in complete contradiction to the rules set up for local residents and interested parties.
The net effect, you suspect, will be to encourage more and more local residents groups to cease being local residents groups, and start being local environmentalist groups. Which will, no doubt, cause utter dismay for the Green Party.
The bill itself is yet to be published – that will happen before the end of the year – but on the face of it it is troubling that environmentalists are to be treated differently, for planning purposes, than anybody else. But it is, yet again, evidence that few political organisations in the country are as effective, or as ruthless, in delivering for their own section of the electorate than the Green Party is.
All the moreso, because this is the kind of legislation that people simply don’t pay attention to: Planning law is one of those things that people don’t spend much time thinking about, until it happens to affect them directly. As such, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that huge swathes of the population will end up dealing with planning matters under these new laws without even realising that they are new laws, or knowing when they were passed or by whom.
But for Green activists, this is the kind of win you get when you elect your team. And it’s an example of how Irish laws keep changing, relatively under the radar, through the assiduous work of activists on the left. They now occupy a special, privileged place in the planning process, unlike the rest of the plebians. And most people affected by that will never find out, until it is too late.