If your next door neighbour built an extension which was 9in higher than was permitted under its planning permission, and an objection was made, the issue as to whether retention could be granted would be a matter for your local council at first instance. After that, it would go on appeal to the planning board, An Bord Pleanála.
If you want to build a Metro system from Swords to Ranelagh, permission must be obtained from the planning board. If you wanted to build a large offshore wind farm development in the Atlantic and obtained a licence/approval from the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, you would need to apply to the planning board. If you want to build a water pipeline from Parteen on the Shannon to the outskirts of Dublin to cope with the city’s growing demand for water, you have to go to the planning board. Likewise, a dispute as to whether you ought to be granted permission to build a dumbwaiter lift in your trophy home on Merrion Square is, ultimately, a planning board matter.
Needless to say, a proposal to increase the number of flights into Dublin Airport also lies, ultimately, within the planning board’s jurisdiction.
Will there be a teacher’s strike in the autumn?
Even with newly enacted legislation, and a name change for the board to describe it as a commission, An Coimisiún Pleanála, the reality is that, from the relatively trivial issue of whether you may build a bike shelter or bin shelter in the front garden of your terraced home to the enormously consequential issue as to whether you should spend €23 billion on MetroLink – and in doing so curtail the capital budget for a massively expanded Luas network for Dublin – the planning board is vested with large competence by the Republic, a State that excels at avoidance and delay in delivery of its physical infrastructure.
Sherlock Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, was famously described as “an expert in omniscience”. The planning board, whose decisions are also subject to judicial review procedure in the courts, has developed into a monster of omni-competence from the petty to the nationally transformative.
Quite how we have arrived at this behemoth of obstruction and delay is hard to understand.
While it is true that EU law requires us to implement environmental impact assessment and transparent processes to relevant decision-making, the State is uniquely sclerotic in relation to deciding and executing projects of national importance.
I have in the past noted that in Victorian times it was possible to plan and build a railway from Dublin to Cork in three years using picks, shovels and carts. This was done by way of legislative process. The promoters of railway projects were enabled to obtain legislative and legal authority for big infrastructural schemes in a far more time-efficient manner. Instead of Uisce Éireann now starting on a 10-year project to seek approval for the Parteen-Dublin water main, it is equally open to the Oireachtas to provide, by way of legislation, for such a project to be planned and implemented without any involvement of what will then be a fully functioning planning commission.
By using the legislative route, Uisce Éireann as promoter could lay before the Oireachtas its detailed scheme for the project, allowing a specialised Oireachtas committee to invite public input and objection and to determine whether the project should proceed in accordance with the approved scheme.
Any subsequent challenge would face the difficulty of upending a statute by reference to constitutional rights.
Put simply, this State must, like Houdini, somehow escape from the bureaucratic and legal straitjacket into which we have gradually but inexorably allowed ourselves to be bound.
I note the Government’s proposal to establish a strategic housing activation office to confront the non-delivery of our housing needs. Minister for Housing James Browne has spoken of it being led by a housing tsar with the capacity to kick down doors to achieve implementation of its plans and goals. If a housing tsar presiding over such an office can deliver on such expectations, then the high salary reportedly under consideration for the appointee would appear good value for the taxpayers’ money. After all, MetroLink’s tsar has been attracted to the Republic by an even greater remuneration package to supervise the expenditure of €23 billion of public money for that one project.
However, while the new housing tsar will no doubt have proven ability, I very much fear that the abject failure of the relevant department to put in place a system of compulsory purchase for land required for big housing construction, whether inner city or on greenfield or brownfield sites, is still the unresolved stumbling block to delivering supply of badly needed land for housing development.
It must be the best part of 40 years since the late Garret FitzGerald floated the idea of senior citizens downsizing to provide extra housing accommodation for younger people. That particular notion is, alas, a non-flyer. Playing whack-a mole with Airbnb controls will not solve our housing supply problem either.
The State must start thinking outside the box.
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