One of the main changes brought about by last year’s Planning and Development Act was the overhaul of An Bord Pleanála, which was then on the verge of collapse as it creaked under the weight of a governance scandal and case backlog.

As he approaches six months as the inaugural CEO of the revamped An Coimisiún Pleanála, Peter Mullan sat down with Alice over two hours for his first major interview. Published on Thursday, their in-depth discussion covers everything from the resourcing and digitisation of the planning process to decision timelines, changes in the planning body’s approach to large infrastructure applications, and the thorny issue of judicial reviews.

Mullan emerges from the interview as an incredibly dedicated public servant who could have ended his career in an easy position but chose, instead, to tackle the bogeyman of Ireland’s housing and infrastructure crisis.

Some of his comments offer genuine reassurance. “There are no housing backlogs in An Coimisiún Pleanála,” he said, bar 16 cases left over from the defunct Strategic Housing Development (SHD) scheme. All other applications for homes are now dealt with within statutory timeframes. Compared to the endless queue Mullan found on his way in, this represents true progress.

His description of the legal department recently established within An Coimisiún Pleanála and its input into more solid decisions inspires confidence that the planning body is becoming less exposed to losing judicial reviews. “Our win-loss ratio is getting better, our concessions are getting lower, and more cases are being withdrawn,” Mullan told Alice, with statistics to back this up.

On Wednesday, one industry directly exposed to the risk of planning delays expressed confidence that things were improving. ESB and Orsted won the State-backed Tonn Nua contract to build a wind farm off the south coast in a competitive auction where the electricity price bid was lower than expected. This means developers, while they have yet to secure planning permission for the project, did not ascribe a significantly higher cost to the process than seen elsewhere in Europe.

Yet on Monday, a group of 20 plaintiffs launched judicial review proceedings against the railway order An Coimisiún Pleanála granted on September 30 for the construction of Dublin’s MetroLink.

Their motivations will become clearer when the High Court considers their motion tomorrow, but the list of objectors gives a clue. Five of them (Grace Maguire, Leo and Anne Crehan, Niall Parsons, and Terry Reid) are residents of Dartmouth Square who previously made submissions to An Coimisiún Pleanála during the railway order process.

There will likely be more overlaps between the other judicial review plaintiffs and neighbouring objectors who had previously made anonymous submissions through planning consultants MacCabe Durney Barnes. For example, Kalamunda Co Unltd, one of the plaintiffs, is a company owned by the successful pharmacy entrepreneur and Dartmouth Square resident Sharon McCabe. (As a director of St Vincent’s Hospital, you could have expected McCabe to have a better understanding of the public good.)

The other judicial review complainants are John Ryan, Geraldine Ann Cusack, Geraldine Cusack, Denis McLoughlin, Martin Jones, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Vandenberghe, Caroline O’Connor, Kitty Wallis, Camillus Wallis, Muiris O’Dwyer, Helena Kelly, Angela Ryan, and Manuel Ryan.

Earlier submissions made by those identified during the railway order process included common arguments around the expected construction disruption caused to the Dartmouth Square neighbourhood, next to which the MetroLink underground line will end at Charlemont. They also argued that the proposed terminus did not offer sufficient connections with other modes of transport and that the line should extend no further south than Tara Street. Submissions requested technical adjustments to the design if implemented all the way to Charlemont.

Of course, the reason MetroLink, as currently designed, ends in Charlemont is that pressure groups further south, emboldened by the support of senior politicians including then Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy, raised so many objections to the upgrade of the Sandyford Luas line to incorporate it into MetroLink in the late 2010s that it was eventually shelved.

“A dramatic impact upon property values”

And so the narrow interests of a small cohort of well-connected residents continue to deprive the rest of Ireland’s capital city of a major public good. One argument made in several of their previous submissions is clearly one of private interest: 

“Evidence submitted to the hearing by affected parties, including valuer’s reports, has illustrated that there will be a dramatic impact upon property values in the area, particularly during the extensive 8.5-year-long construction period. This has the potential to leave property owners with significant levels of negative equity, unable to move owing to the project-related devaluation in the value of their properties, yet having to endure the significant adverse effects of the development,” MacCabe Durney Barnes wrote on behalf of a group of Dartmouth Road residents. 

Parsons made a direct link between his personal wealth and his perception that this should be a deciding factor in the planning process: “There will be a significant ‘devaluation in property’ and the board must refuse this element of the railway order,” he wrote to the then An Bord Pleanála last year. This clash between private rights and public needs will be at the centre of the High Court challenge.

Meanwhile, rumblings continued in response to entrepreneur John Collison’s opinion article in The Irish Times last month, where he centrally argued: “We need to reverse the continued reassignment of power in Ireland – and many countries around the world – from elected politicians to the Civil Service and agencies.”

This expanded on Collison’s view, articulated in successive interviews with The Currency and elsewhere for the past year, that the administrative regulation of development – especially on environmental grounds – is increasingly detached from the democratic will of the people. 

Unfortunately, Collison has consistently conflated environmental objectives with the fact that the courts are not the appropriate forum to implement them on a project-by-project basis.

“The larger billionaire class”

The past week’s chatter was all about Collinson’s latest rebuttal by Andrew Jackson of UCD’s Environmental Law and Justice Group. Aside from efficiently pointing out inaccuracies in the examples picked by Collison, Jackson also dismissed the alternative between applying environmental law and meeting the population’s needs. 

“If environmental goals have created stasis, they are doing a very good job of hiding the fact, while the environment itself continues to deteriorate at pace,” Jackson wrote, equating the “threats to social stability and democracy posed by environmental degradation and climate change” with those caused by “any persistent failure in meeting people’s basic needs”.

Ronan’s column addressed a similar debate on Wednesday, when he examined the trade-offs between data-centre development and energy management. 

Caught in the middle, Mullan dismissed criticism from “some of the larger billionaire class” and industry bodies as a misunderstanding of An Coimisiún Pleanála’s role. When Wind Energy Ireland, for example, assigns a quarterly target of renewable energy generation to secure planning permission if Ireland is to meet its climate obligations, Mullan reacts vehemently: “No, that’s not our job! Our job is to decide each application on its merits.”

I wrote last week about the way France is currently building 10 times as much metro capacity in Paris as Ireland is planning in Dublin, having discussed it for half the time. French infrastructure planning includes public consultations that look 15 years ahead and an acknowledgement that the current Paris metro extension was too big to fit inside existing regulation, leading to the passing of special legislation in parliament.

One thing Collison and Jackson agree on is that business as usual is not sustainable. As a former Parisian, I can see one root cause of this Irish impasse that neither of them, nor other observers, seems to have identified.

After centuries of colonial history, independent Ireland has enshrined land ownership as one of its deepest ideological foundations. The closest thing to monarchy that survives to this day in the Republic is the God-given right to property, which turns any attempt at the delivery of infrastructure into a diplomatic mission directed at neighbouring landowners.

Ireland needs to answer a series of deep questions raised by the residents of Dartmouth Square, and the High Court may need help from legislators to address them properly:

• Does improved infrastructure make property more or less valuable? (every evidence, such as that linked to the delivery of the Luas, suggests more)
• If individual devaluation occurs, is this a sufficient reason to deprive the general population of public goods?
• If public goods are more important, should private interests be compensated? (And if so, this can surely happen only after a loss has been realised, not on a speculative basis).

These questions are entirely different from those raised by environmental regulation, which results from the interaction between scientific research and democratic political decisions at the national and EU levels.

I would love to read Collison and Jackson’s answers to them.

*****

Elsewhere this week, audits released to Niall revealed concerns over a pattern of non-compliance with clean-desk policies and “inadequate” data breach management at the National State Services Office, which handles sensitive payments and pensions details for thousands of public servants including ministers.

Jonathan covered the collapse of the US luxury short-term letting firm Sonder after a deal with the Marriott hotel chain went sour, and the resulting liquidation of its Irish business.

As the UK unveiled its budget on Wednesday, Peter examined the challenges facing Chancellor Rachel Reeves ahead of her speech. In London, Michael then analysed the potential for the measures announced on budget day to restore British growth.

On a recent trip to Mexico, Hannah met Limerick man Tom Stack, who runs the local business of the Co Kerry-based company BioAtlantis. The business converts extracts from seaweed found off Ireland’s Atlantic coast into crop stimulants helping farmers boost yields and withstand climate stress all the way to Latin America.