Irish Planning Law Roundup, 4 November 2026

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only. It is not legal advice.

A quiet week in the Planning and Environment List, with one written judgment of note. It is a familiar kind of case for anyone who writes or reads inspectors' reports: a challenge to a housing permission that turned on whether a density was a material contravention of the development plan. The answer the High Court gave, and the way it gave it, says a good deal about how density reasoning should be set out.

Ballyboden density challenge fails: "built-up urban area" read across Dublin's existing footprint

Ballyboden Tidy Towns Company Limited by Guarantee v An Coimisiún Pleanála [2026] IEHC 709 (Shannon Homes Dublin Unlimited Company, notice party). High Court (Humphreys J), judgment delivered 30 October 2026 and published on the Courts Service judgments list on 4 November 2026 (record H.JR.2025.0001729).

The case concerns the former Augustinian seminary at Taylor's Lane, Ballyboden, and it has a long history. A strategic housing development permission for 486 apartments was quashed in January 2022 (Ballyboden Tidy Towns Group v An Bord Pleanála [2022] IEHC 7), on grounds including the failure to consider public transport capacity properly. A second permission, for 401 units, was conceded by the Commission in February 2025. The third, for 402 apartments, was granted on 22 September 2025 subject to 31 conditions, and it was this permission that the applicant challenged in November 2025. Among its grounds was that the inspector, with whom the Commission agreed, erred in law in finding that the scheme's density was not a material contravention of the South Dublin County Development Plan.

According to the Irish Times report of the judgment, Humphreys J dismissed the challenge. He described the "insuperable" difficulty in the applicant's case as its failure to show that the site was not a built-up urban area. He read the plan provision at issue as supporting higher density within the existing footprint of Dublin, suburbs included, and not as confined to land close to suburban centres or transport nodes. The inspector and the Commission, he said, were exercising "an evaluative judgment" on the appropriateness of the density, having regard to a range of policy guidance. He added that even if there had been a legal flaw he would have exercised the court's discretion to refuse certiorari, as quashing would be "disproportionate", noting that both the council and the Commission had found the scheme acceptable and that there is "an urgent public interest in the provision of housing". His provisional view on costs was that each side should bear its own, with final orders to follow.

What it means for your assessment

Three points stand out for planners and inspectors. First, the material contravention question is a two-step exercise, and the report should show both steps. The meaning of a plan provision is a question of law for the court, read as a reasonable reader would understand it; whether a proposal at a given density is appropriate under that provision is a matter of planning judgment. Reports that quote the governing density provision, say plainly how it is being read (here, whether "built-up urban area" means the whole existing urban footprint or only areas near centres and nodes), and then give the evaluative reasons by reference to the relevant guidance, are much harder to fault than reports that move straight to a conclusion. Second, the burden lies on a challenger to establish the factual premise of a material contravention argument. Third-party objectors and their advisers who want to argue that a site falls outside a category in the plan should put evidence and reasoning on that point before the planning authority or the Commission, rather than leaving it to the courtroom. Third, the court's comments on discretion are a reminder that certiorari is not automatic even where an error is shown, but they are not a reason to relax. The Taylor's Lane site has been through three permissions and three judicial reviews since 2022, and the earlier ones were lost or conceded on points such as public transport capacity and appropriate assessment screening. Careful reasoning at first instance remains the surest protection for every party, whether developer, council or community.

Elsewhere in the courts

Two developments this week did not involve written judgments but are worth noting. The last judicial review of the N6 Galway City Ring Road was withdrawn after mediation on cycling and walking commitments, as reported by The Journal on 2 November. And the Irish Examiner reported on 29 October that the High Court had quashed, on consent, the Commission's refusal of more than 300 homes at Coolcarron, Fermoy, refused originally for the lack of playing pitches required by the local area plan; the application is back before the Commission.

Further reading

• Hundreds of apartments near Dublin Mountains get go-ahead from High Court, The Irish Times, 2 November 2026
• Ballyboden Tidy Towns Group v An Bord Pleanála [2022] IEHC 7, the first Taylor's Lane judgment
• Ballyboden Tidy Towns Company Limited by Guarantee v An Coimisiún Pleanála [2026] IEHC 709 (PDF)

Irish Planning History: The Historians of Dublin’s Suburbs and Slums

For the last two Fridays this series has leaned on a journalist. Frank McDonald wrote the charge sheet against the destruction of Dublin and then the programme for saving it, and he wrote both with a reporter's eye for the villain of the week. But journalism, even very good journalism, is written against a deadline, and the slower question of how Dublin came to have the shape it has (why it sprawls, why its inner suburbs look the way they do, why so much of its social map was fixed before most of our grandparents were born) has been answered mostly by a small group of academic geographers and historians. Their work is less often quoted at oral hearings than it should be, and this piece is an attempt to introduce it to planners who may only know it by its cover.

Ruth McManus and the making of the suburbs

The obvious place to start is Ruth McManus's Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs, first published by Four Courts Press in 2002 and reissued in a new edition in 2021. McManus, now Associate Professor of Geography at Dublin City University, set out to explain three decades in which, as her publisher puts it, "many of the formative decisions that came to shape the modern low-rise, low-density city were taken". Anyone who has ever argued for or against density on a suburban site in Dublin is, whether they know it or not, arguing with the consequences of those decisions.

The book's structure tells the story on its own. Its contents page moves from the 1913 Housing Inquiry, through Patrick Geddes and Raymond Unwin as consultants and the Dublin Town Planning Competition, to the Civic Survey of 1925 and the new municipal boundaries, and only then to the Corporation as developer, with sections on the location debate between city and suburbs and on flats versus cottages. It is a reminder that the arguments we treat as new, about whether to build up in the centre or out at the edge, were being had in almost the same words a century ago.

McManus's most useful idea for a practising planner is what she calls a "development continuum". The usual story divides Dublin's growth neatly into Corporation estates on one side and private speculation on the other. Her research suggests something messier, with the State, the Corporation, public utility societies (a form of co-operative housing body) and private builders all interacting, so that the line between public and private development was never as sharp as it looks on a zoning map. A long chapter is given over to a single builder, Alexander Strain, whose estates in Drumcondra and Glasnevin show how much one speculative builder could shape the layout and style of a whole district.

She has kept returning to the subject. With Joseph Brady she wrote Building Healthy Homes: Dublin Corporation's First Housing Schemes, 1880-1925, published by Dublin City Council in 2021, which looks at the small, well-built inner city schemes that most Dubliners walk past without noticing, and ends with Marino and Drumcondra, seen at the time as models for the future and still sought after today. The two have since added Killester: From Medieval Manor to Garden Suburb (2025), the story of the garden suburb built in the 1920s for ex-servicemen of the First World War.

A personal note. When I taught in the School of Spatial Planning at what was then the Dublin Institute of Technology, Dr McManus kindly gave a lecture to my class. It was a generous gift of her time to students just beginning to learn how the city they would go on to plan had come to be, and I remain grateful for it. Her books have had a place on my shelves ever since, and I am glad of the chance to say thank you.

The view from outside Dublin

McManus has also done planners outside the capital a favour. In a 2018 article in Urban History she turned to the provincial towns of the Free State, pointing out that Dublin's slums had so dominated the story that it was "largely overlooked" that the rest of the country was struggling too. She challenges the idea that the inter-war years were a kind of limbo in Irish housing, and the figures she gives are striking: from 1922 to 1927 local authorities built about 6,500 houses, compared with about 9,000 in the previous forty years, and by 1940 local authority dwellings accounted for 84,000 units, more than half of them completed in the 1930s.

Her case study is Ballina, whose council built more houses than any other urban council, owning almost half the houses in the town by 1938. It is a cautionary tale as much as a success story. New schemes were often of a single type and a single class of tenant, rents were beyond many of the families who most needed the houses, and the rates bill rose sharply. One letter to the council on behalf of 228 tenants at Tirawley Park and Lord Edward Street recorded that 160 of them were on unemployment assistance. Anyone who works on social housing or mixed-tenure schemes today will recognise the problem: the people who most need decent housing cannot always afford to pay for it, and a scheme that is built for one group alone can harden into a district apart.

Joseph Brady, Anngret Simms and the long view

McManus's work sits inside a larger project. With Joseph Brady, formerly head of the UCD School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, and Anngret Simms, formerly Professor of Geography at UCD, she co-edits the Making of Dublin City series from Four Courts Press. The first volume, Dublin Through Space and Time, c.900-1900 (2001), edited by Brady and Simms, is the best single introduction I know to how the city's plan was laid down. Simms writes on its origins and early growth, Edel Sheridan on the designing of the capital between about 1660 and 1810, including the Gardiner and Fitzwilliam estates and the Wide Streets Commission, Jacinta Prunty on public health and housing in the nineteenth century, and Brady on the city at the turn of the twentieth century. Brady has since carried the story forward in later volumes, including Dublin 1930-1950: The Emergence of the Modern City (2014) and Dublin 1950-1970: Houses, Flats and High-Rise (2016).

For a planner the value of this series is that it treats the city as something built by decisions, not by fate. The Wide Streets Commissioners, the great estates, the Corporation's housing architects and the speculative builders all appear as actors with interests, powers and constraints, which is exactly how a planning file reads today.

Jacinta Prunty and the slums

If McManus explains the suburbs, Jacinta Prunty's Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography explains what people were fleeing. Based on her UCD doctoral thesis and published by Irish Academic Press in 1998, it rebuilds the slum geography of the city from public inquiries, property valuations and the records of women charity workers, and closes with a study of the north city parishes of St Mary's and St Michan's. A review in New Hibernia Review compared it to a "Brandeis brief", an argument built on data rather than authority, and noted that Prunty, a Sister of the Holy Family, does not use her research to push a thesis of her own. Another, in Victorian Studies, observed that she lived and worked in the Coombe, one of the districts in the book, and called the result "a kind of lamentation for the poverty of both people and policy".

What strikes a planner reading Prunty is how fluid the slum turns out to be. Clearing one court pushed families into the next, a pattern McManus found repeated in miniature in Ballinasloe in the 1930s. It is a useful corrective whenever a regeneration scheme is promoted as a clean solution to a problem that has simply been displaced.

Erika Hanna and the sixties

The last book in this short survey brings us back to McDonald's territory, but from a different angle. Erika Hanna's Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957-1973, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, looks at the decade when, in its own summary, the physical landscape of Dublin "changed more than at any time since the eighteenth century". Hanna, whom McDonald himself drew on when writing about the Leeson Street residents, is careful not to read the period as a simple fight between philistine developers and enlightened conservationists. Her chapters move from planning and the eighteenth-century city to Kildare Place and the Irish Georgian Society, to housing, community and preservation, and to office politics, and her conclusion is titled "The Invention of Georgian Dublin". That phrase alone is worth a planner's attention: the Georgian city we now protect was, in part, a set of values that had to be argued for before it could be written into development plans and protected structure records.

What the historians give us

It would be easy to treat all of this as background reading, pleasant for a winter evening and irrelevant to Monday's file. I think that would be a mistake. Planning in Ireland is a statutory process, but it is also a cumulative one, and most of the questions that come across a planner's desk in Dublin, about density, tenure mix, the treatment of historic fabric or the relationship between a new scheme and the estate beside it, have a history that these writers have already mapped. A planner acting for a developer who wants to intensify an inter-war suburb, and a planner acting for residents who want to protect its character, are both better served by knowing why that suburb was laid out as it was, by whom, and under what rules.

There is also a lesson in method. McManus, Brady, Prunty and Hanna all work from the record: inquiry reports, Dáil debates, council minutes, valuations and maps. That is the same discipline good planning practice depends on, and it is a quiet rebuke to the habit, on all sides of a planning argument, of asserting what a place has always been like rather than finding out.

Further reading

• Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs, by Ruth McManus (Four Courts Press, 2002; new edition 2021)
• Building Healthy Homes: Dublin Corporation's First Housing Schemes, 1880-1925, by Joseph Brady and Ruth McManus (Dublin City Council, 2021)
• Killester: From Medieval Manor to Garden Suburb, by Joseph Brady and Ruth McManus (Four Courts Press, 2025)
• Tackling the urban housing problem in the Irish Free State, 1922-1940, by Ruth McManus (Urban History, 2018)
• Dublin Through Space and Time, c.900-1900, edited by Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (Four Courts Press, 2001)
• Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography, by Jacinta Prunty (Irish Academic Press, 1998)
• Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957-1973, by Erika Hanna (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Planner’s Take, 6 November 2026

Rail stations before houses: funding the infrastructure that unlocks zoned land

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.

Housing delivery talk in Ireland often collapses into a quarrel about permissions: how many were granted, how many were refused, how long appeals take, and whether judicial review is the villain of the piece. Yesterday's announcement from Housing Minister James Browne is a useful reminder that a large part of the real constraint sits one step earlier. The minister has approved €27 million from the Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund for three new train stations — at Blarney and Water Rock in Cork and Maynooth West in Kildare — with the explicit aim of unlocking more than 12,000 homes beside improved rail. Subject to planning, the Cork stations are now expected under construction by late 2027 or early 2028 and open in 2029; Maynooth West design work is brought forward so construction could start around late 2028. Without the fund, the Department says delivery of these stations was unlikely before 2031.

That is planning practice in a single sentence. Zoned land without a station, a water main, a road or a school is not housing land in any useful sense. It is an aspiration on a map. Compact growth strategies in development plans and national policy have for years pointed large residential numbers at rail corridors and urban expansion areas. The Cork Area Commuter Rail programme and DART+ West are the transport half of that bargain. The Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund, managed by the Housing Activation Office inside a €1 billion envelope, is the housing half: pay for the enabling works that otherwise sit in a queue of departmental priorities and never arrive in step with the houses.

The numbers attached to the three stations make the point concrete. About 3,700 homes are linked to Blarney, 2,500 to 3,000 to Water Rock, and more than 6,000 to Maynooth West. Those are not permissions. They are the housing capacity the State expects to unlock once the stations exist. For councils writing local area plans, for applicants assembling phased schemes, and for communities that will live with the traffic and school demand, the timing of the station is as important as the zoning. A station that opens years after the first houses are occupied produces a different place from one that is ready when people move in.

There is a fair counter-argument, and it should be stated plainly. Funding a station does not grant planning permission for the homes beside it, does not fund the schools and local roads, and does not settle who pays for the last mile of services. Local representatives in Cork have already made that point about Water Rock: a station is only one part of what a new community needs. There is also a risk that infrastructure funding is treated as a substitute for harder choices about density, mix and viability on the housing sites themselves. A station that unlocks low-density sprawl at the edge of a catchment is a poorer public investment than one that supports compact, walkable neighbourhoods consistent with development plan objectives and the Compact Settlement Guidelines.

A second objection is process. The Cork stations remain subject to planning approval. That is as it should be. Accelerating design and construction funding does not short-circuit environmental assessment, appropriate assessment where required, or the ordinary rights of observation and appeal. Chief Justice Donal O'Donnell's remarks this week — that it is too easy to blame judicial review alone for delay, and that much obstruction sits earlier in the process — sit comfortably beside this announcement. Money for stations addresses one of those earlier bottlenecks. It does not abolish the need for lawful decisions on the stations or the housing.

For practice, watch the planning applications for Blarney and Water Rock stations and the design stages for Maynooth West. Align housing applications and local area plan phasing with realistic station opening dates. Press, through submissions and pre-application meetings, for the roads, schools, open space and active travel links that must arrive with the houses. For An Coimisiún Pleanála and the councils, the fund is evidence of State priority for transport-oriented growth in these locations; it is not a reason to waive density, design or environmental standards.

On balance, putting €27 million into stations that bring rail and housing into the same timetable is a better use of public money than another round of arguments about which permission was too slow. Infrastructure-led planning only works when the infrastructure is real, funded and timed. The test now is whether Blarney, Water Rock and Maynooth West get their stations when the houses need them, and whether the homes that follow match the compact, serviced places the plans describe.

Irish Town Planner Planning News Roundup, 6 November 2026

Here is today's round-up of town planning news from around Ireland, covering €27 million for new rail stations to unlock more than 12,000 homes, the chief justice's warning against blaming judicial review alone for planning delay, a High Court challenge to paid parking at Blanchardstown Centre, an appeal against 47 homes in Milford, five houses approved in Enfield, a second phase of 49 homes sought in Carlow, and five apartments proposed near Killarney town centre.

€27m for Blarney, Water Rock and Maynooth West stations to unlock housing

Housing Minister James Browne has approved €27 million from the Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund for three new train stations at Blarney and Water Rock in Cork and Maynooth West in Kildare, aimed at unlocking more than 12,000 homes beside improved rail. Subject to planning, the Cork stations are expected to start construction by late 2027 or early 2028 and open in 2029, several years earlier than previously likely; Maynooth West design work is brought forward with construction potentially from late 2028. The fund is part of a €1 billion programme managed by the Housing Activation Office; the ministers say the stations will serve about 3,700 homes at Blarney, 2,500–3,000 at Water Rock and more than 6,000 at Maynooth West.

Source: Department of Housing (5 November 2026)

Chief justice says it is unfair to blame judicial review alone for delay

Chief Justice Donal O'Donnell has told the IIEA Young Professionals Network that it is "too easy" to blame the legal system for "so-called dysfunction" in getting developments through, and that in a planning context "a lot of delay" sits earlier in the process. He said judicial review involves claims seeking to enforce law that already exists, and that reform intended to be transparent and fair can become an obstruction, citing the idea in Ezra Klein's book Abundance. Irish politicians, including the Taoiseach, have criticised judicial reviews for holding up housing and infrastructure; the justice minister's Civil Reform Bill aims to streamline the mechanism.

Source: Irish Examiner (5 November 2026)

TD challenges paid-parking approval at Blanchardstown Centre

People Before Profit–Solidarity TD Ruth Coppinger has lodged a High Court judicial review seeking leave to overturn An Coimisiún Pleanála's September approval for car-park management controls, including paid parking, across nine car parks at Blanchardstown Centre, with associated pedestrian and cycle works. She argues the Commission failed to have proper regard to the major town centre zoning, the centre's civic role (council offices, district court, library, health and other services) and her submissions on congestion, displacement onto Whitestown roads and impacts on lower-income, older and disabled people. Fingal County Council had granted permission in November 2025; the application will be listed later in the High Court's planning list.

Source: The Irish Times (5 November 2026)

Milford 47-home grant appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála

The Lower Mount Marian Residents Group has appealed Donegal County Council's grant of permission to Kelly Property Development Ltd for 47 homes between Milford and Gortmacall Beg — 20 two-bed houses, eight two-bed apartments and 19 three-bed houses. Residents say they do not oppose housing in principle but raise traffic and pedestrian safety, the adequacy of supporting assessments, access arrangements and amenity impacts on the established neighbourhood. Fourteen of the homes are designed to Universal Design guidance, and there is an agreement in principle that nine units would transfer to the council for social housing.

Source: Donegal Daily (5 November 2026)

Five houses approved off Enfield Main Street

Meath County Council has granted Greenshannon Developments Ltd permission to demolish the existing two-storey house on a 0.43-hectare portion of a Main Street site in Enfield and build five detached homes — one five-bed replacement and four four-bed dwellings — with access from the existing Main Street entrance. In February the same applicant was granted permission to refurbish and extend the house and build three new four-bed detached homes on the wider 0.69-hectare holding; construction of those three homes is already under way.

Source: Meath Chronicle (5 November 2026)

49 homes sought as phase two at Chapelstown, Carlow

Elmdorf Ltd has applied to Carlow County Council for phase two of its Chapelstown scheme: 49 two-storey houses (six two-bed, 39 three-bed and four four-bed) north of a previously permitted 64-home development west of the Link Road (L1026). Access would extend the already permitted vehicular and pedestrian entrance; each home would have two parking spaces plus six visitor spaces (104 in total). The application was lodged on 2 November, with submissions due by 6 December and a decision due by 1 January 2027.

Source: Ireland Live / Carlow Live (5 November 2026)

Five apartments sought beside Killarney bus station

Kerry developer Boocon Company Limited has applied to Kerry County Council for five apartments in two two-storey blocks behind Railway Lodge at 12 Fairhill, Killarney, across from the town bus station on Park Road. The scheme is described as car-free, with secure bicycle parking and pedestrian and cyclist access from Park Road through the existing lodge entrance; a Uisce Éireann pre-connection enquiry is under assessment. The applicant stresses the site's walkable access to services, employment and public transport.

Source: Irish Independent (5 November 2026)

Opinion: Public Service Planners, Professional Training and the Technical Grade

Why shortlisting for planners should start with a postgraduate qualification

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.

Open any recent candidate booklet for Assistant Planner and the education requirement is the same. Tipperary, Longford, Kildare and others ask for an honours degree at Level 8 on the National Framework of Qualifications in Planning, a stated period of satisfactory planning experience, and a high standard of technical training. A master’s is not required. Irish Planning Institute or Royal Town Planning Institute membership is often desirable, not essential. That wording is not a drafting quirk. It is how local authorities, under Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage circulars, now define the entry grade of a profession that once trained almost entirely at postgraduate level.

The grade those booklets fill is a technical and professional one. In local government structures, Assistant, Executive, Senior Executive and Senior Planner sit with the corresponding engineer and architect grades, not with the clerical and administrative ladder from Clerical Officer to Senior Executive Officer. From 1 June 2026, under Circular EL 04/2026 and the Public Service Agreement 2024–2026, Assistant Planner pay runs from €48,248 to €74,809 including the second long-service increment; Executive Planner from €60,858 to €84,596. Those are the same euro figures as Assistant and Executive Engineer. The technical grade is real. The question is what professional training is needed to justify it.

Ireland’s modern planning education did not begin with a four-year undergraduate degree. University College Dublin’s Regional and Urban Planning programme commenced in October 1966. The Irish Planning Institute’s own history records that the first formally educated planners trained in the Republic graduated from the College of Technology, Bolton Street, and from UCD in 1969; before that, aspirants sat Royal Town Planning Institute external examinations or studied abroad. The Institute itself was launched in November 1975. University College Cork’s Masters in Planning and Sustainable Development took its foundation class in October 2006. The undergraduate route came later. Technological University Dublin’s combined BSc in Spatial Planning and Environmental Management, under the old DIT code DT106, produced its first graduating cohort in 2005, which implies a first intake around 2001, and that programme, now TU835, is fully accredited by the Irish Planning Institute as a standalone four-year degree. UCD’s BSc in City Planning and Environmental Policy, by contrast, is IPI-accredited only when completed with the accelerated Master of Regional and Urban Planning. So the Republic’s professional tradition was postgraduate first; the accredited undergraduate pathway is real, recent, and, in TU Dublin’s case, fully recognised. I taught in the School of Spatial Planning at DIT between 2002 and 2005, in the early years of that undergraduate experiment, and I have no interest in talking down the graduates it has produced.

Many fine planners in the public service and in private practice hold a primary planning degree and no more. Experience on planning applications, at oral hearings and in forward planning teams matters, and shortlisting that ignored experience would make little sense. Nor is a Level 8 award a trivial thing. What it is not, on its own, is a complete answer to why planners are paid and graded as technical professionals rather than as administrative officers who happen to work in a planning section. Plenty of staff on administrative grades also hold primary degrees. The technical grade has to be justified by something more than that: by a depth of professional education in planning as a discipline, or by a recognised planning specialism built on top of a first degree, together with the experience the booklets already require.

Here I must be careful. It is my observation, from competitions and from conversation across the profession, that candidates with an accredited postgraduate qualification in planning sometimes lose out at interview to candidates who hold only a primary degree. I am not claiming a published pattern, and I have seen no Irish Planning Institute or union statistics that would prove one. Eligibility under the current booklets treats both as Level 8 in Planning. Interview boards then score competencies: planning policy and practice, delivering results, performance through people, personal effectiveness. On that footing, a master’s confers no automatic advantage. Whether boards undervalue postgraduate professional education is an open question. The same arrangement can also mean that candidates with a master’s or a doctorate in planning are interviewed by a board whose planning member holds a primary degree. That is no reflection on the experience and judgement of the people who sit on those boards, many of whom are excellent and senior planners. It does suggest, though, that the system has not yet decided how much weight advanced professional education should carry. That such outcomes can happen is enough to ask whether the shortlisting stage is doing the work it should.

Public appointments practice already distinguishes eligibility from shortlisting. Guidance associated with the Commission for Public Service Appointments Code of Practice, which applies to technical and professional appointments in local authorities, expects clear differentiation between essential and desirable requirements, objective criteria linked to the role, and shortlisting on essential requirements and, where appropriate, the most desirable ones. Restrictive eligibility criteria, by contrast, can be treated as a breach. The practical implication is important. Raising the eligibility bar overnight so that only master’s holders may apply would need careful justification and would cut across the State’s present drive to widen the recruitment pool. Using postgraduate planning, or a recognised planning specialism, as a leading desirable criterion at shortlisting is a different and more defensible approach: it keeps the Level 8 door open, ranks professional education honestly, and invites degree-only candidates to interview when no better-qualified candidate is available.

The shortage argument has to be faced squarely. The Department’s Ministerial Action Plan on Planning Resources, published in October 2024, sets out fourteen actions on education, recruitment, retention and efficiency. It expressly seeks to increase uptake of undergraduate and postgraduate places, to run graduate recruitment campaigns, and in particular to review qualification requirements for planning posts in local government so that the sector can attract as wide a pool of talent as possible. In March 2025, Town Planning Officer was added to the Critical Skills Occupations List after a joint submission that included the Irish Planning Institute. The Office of the Planning Regulator’s advice to would-be planners is that an IPI- or RTPI-accredited qualification is normally required. The direction of policy, in other words, is towards more planners, more routes in, and a wider pool. A profession that responds to shortage by narrowing the gate without expanding the numbers coming through the colleges would be doing itself no favours.

The answer to the shortage is not to pretend that a primary degree and a postgraduate qualification are the same thing. It is to fund more accredited postgraduate places; to support part-time and conversion master’s routes for serving staff who entered on a primary degree and wish to deepen their professional education; and, if shortlisting practice changes, to allow a clear transition period so that people already in the system are not left at a disadvantage. Widening the pool and honouring professional depth are not opposites if the State pays for the depth.

All of this is unfolding inside a much larger industrial dispute in which planners are present but not to the forefront. Since late September 2026, Fórsa members in local government have been on work-to-rule, with SIPTU members across local authorities and state agencies on similar action, over the failure to agree a successor public service pay deal. There was a full-day strike on 14 October. A further national stoppage is planned for 12 November. As of 4 November, Workplace Relations Commission efforts to restore face-to-face talks had produced no breakthrough; Fórsa’s general secretary warned that one-day national strikes could give way to rolling sectoral disruption. The dispute is about pay, living standards and inflation risk across hundreds of thousands of public servants. It is not a planner’s dispute, and the Irish Planning Institute has not been its public face.

Planning has, however, felt the knock-on effects. The Irish Examiner reported on 26 October that further commencement of the Planning and Development Act 2024 has been paused because of the work-to-rule, with the Department of Housing citing circumstances beyond its control and a substantial portion of the Act still to be brought into force. Fórsa’s own local government guidance draws a useful line: routine individual planning applications and normal statutory services may continue, and engagement with applicants’ agents on those applications should continue; participation in broader restructuring, modernisation and change programmes is covered by the instruction to withdraw cooperation. So day-to-day applications may still be processed while the reform programme stalls. That is an awkward place for a profession that the State needs both to process applications and to implement the new planning legislation.

What, then, should be done about professional training and the technical grade? Several options are open. One is to leave eligibility and shortlisting as they are and trust interview boards to weigh professional education case by case. That is straightforward, and it matches the Action Plan’s wish to widen the pool, but it leaves the technical grade resting on a Level 8 award that administrative grades also commonly hold. A second is to raise eligibility itself to an accredited postgraduate qualification. That would be the cleanest professional statement, and the hardest to reconcile quickly with shortage and with fair treatment of serving staff. A third, the one I favour, is to keep Level 8 eligibility, state clearly that an accredited postgraduate qualification in planning or a recognised planning specialism is a leading desirable criterion, and shortlist those candidates first, inviting degree-only applicants to interview only where no better-qualified candidate is available. Experience would still count. TU Dublin’s fully accredited BSc would still open the door. Serving staff could be offered funded conversion routes. And the academic analogy, offered gently, still holds: few university departments would shortlist an applicant with a master’s for a post alongside doctoral candidates as if the two awards said the same thing about professional education. Planners may not want to hear that. The technical grade requires us to say it anyway.

You cannot bring a more demanding planning system into force with a diminished sense of what a planner is. The pay dispute will be settled, or not, on terms that apply far beyond planning departments. The question of professional education is ours. If we want the technical grade, we have to justify it in the booklet, at shortlisting, and in the training places the State says it is willing to fund.

Sources

• Longford County Council, Assistant Planner candidate booklet (AP/0126)
• Longford County Council, Executive Planner candidate booklet (EP/0126)
• Tipperary County Council, Assistant Planner candidate booklet (RT/863)
• Kildare County Council, Assistant Planner candidate booklet
• Department circular EL 04/2026 (pay scales from 1 June 2026)
• Fórsa, Local Government Salary Scales
• Kilkenny County Council grading structure
• Irish Planning Institute, accredited courses
• Irish Planning Institute, History
• Office of the Planning Regulator, Becoming a Planner
• TU Dublin, DT106 Class of 2005 reunion note
• UCC, MPlan ethos / foundation class 2006
• UCD News, Irish planning and the role of UCD (2007)
• Ministerial Action Plan on Planning Resources (October 2024)
• Minister Cummins, Critical Skills Occupations List announcement (10 March 2025)
• Fórsa, Local Government National Industrial Action 2026 FAQs
• Irish Times, public sector pay talks (4 November 2026)
• Irish Examiner, Planning and Development Act commencement paused (26 October 2026)
• Commission for Public Service Appointments, guidance on the Code of Practice

Planner’s Take, 5 November 2026

Apartment standards now a National Planning Statement as EU court questions hang over

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.

What was anticipated yesterday is now in force. On 4 November, Housing Minister James Browne and Minister of State John Cummins jointly issued the Planning Design Standards for Apartments as a National Planning Statement under section 25 of the Planning and Development Act 2024. It replaces the July 2025 Design Standards for Apartments ministerial guidelines and applies to any planning application, appeal or direct application to An Coimisiún Pleanála determined after that date. For applicants, council planners and Commission inspectors with live apartment files, the operative national design parameters have changed overnight.

The political purpose is clear enough. The ministers said the statement was issued to provide certainty and to boost apartment delivery. The legal vehicle matters. Section 28 guidelines under the 2000 Act could contain specific planning policy requirements that decision-makers had to apply. Under the 2024 Act, development plans and regional strategies must be materially consistent with the national planning policies and measures in a statement and take due account of its guidance. Where the principle of apartment development is already established under the statutory plan and the Compact Settlement Guidelines, determinations after 4 November must apply the statement's design parameters on mix, internal space, dual aspect, floor-to-ceiling heights, stair and lift cores, storage, balconies and amenity. That is the day-to-day test for schemes already in the system and for further information responses still outstanding.

The context that makes the move so charged is the litigation still hanging over the 2025 guidelines. Councillors Darragh Moriarty, David Healy, Dan Boyle and Pádraig McEvoy, together with the late Frank McDonald, challenged those guidelines on the basis that they should have been subject to strategic environmental assessment before adoption. Questions on the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive have been referred from the High Court to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The ministers have been careful to say that the new statement is issued strictly without prejudice to those proceedings. That formulation should be taken at face value. Issuing a National Planning Statement does not extinguish the judicial review, does not answer the referred questions, and does not, of itself, settle the status of permissions already granted under the 2025 guidelines.

There are reasonable objections, and they deserve a fair hearing. Sinn Féin's Eoin Ó Broin argues that the standards will produce smaller and darker apartments, and that reissuing them as a statement is an attempt to make inferior design standards less susceptible to successful challenge. Social Democrats' Rory Hearne has likewise criticised the reduction in apartment size and standards. Floor area, daylight and outdoor space are not easily retrofitted once built, and Ireland's past experience with poor apartment stock is a reason for caution. Treating design standards as the main lever on viability also risks overlooking construction costs, finance, land values and the shortage of buyers at the prices schemes need. Those concerns go to the content of the standards, not only their legal form.

A second objection is legal process. Moving from guidelines to a statement after environmental assessment and consultation puts the instrument on firmer ground than guidelines adopted without that assessment. That is a legitimate reason for wanting certainty, and practitioners will welcome a clearer national baseline for decisions from 4 November. It does not follow that the Court of Justice's eventual answers cease to matter. How Ireland classifies national planning documents under the SEA Directive will continue to shape future statements.

For practice, the immediate task is narrower. Check which applications will be determined after 4 November. Read the final text carefully to see which elements are framed as binding national planning policy and which as guidance. Align drawings, schedules and planning reports with the new parameters where the apartment principle is already accepted. Flag transition issues for files lodged under the old guidelines but still awaiting decision. Councils and the Commission will be expected to apply the statement; applicants who ignore it risk refusal or costly redesign late in the process.

On balance, putting apartment standards on a statutory National Planning Statement footing, with the ministers' express without-prejudice reservation as to the pending European proceedings, is a coherent attempt to give decision-makers something firm to apply. Certainty has real value for housing delivery. Standards should still be judged on whether they produce homes people will want to live in for decades, not only on whether they make schemes viable this year. The statement is now the operative national document for post-4 November determinations. The Court of Justice's answers, when they come, will still matter for how Ireland makes national planning policy. Neither point cancels the other.

Irish Town Planner Planning News Roundup, 5 November 2026

Here is today's round-up of town planning news from around Ireland, covering the issuing of a National Planning Statement on apartment standards, Wicklow's grant for the Vartry water supply project, An Coimisiún Pleanála's refusal of 80 homes at Tower for inefficient density, an upheld refusal of 22 homes near Naas, record first-half social home builds, a warning that housing output may slip after 2027, and ten four-bed homes sought in Buncrana.

National Planning Statement on apartment standards issued

Housing Minister James Browne and Minister of State John Cummins have issued the Planning Design Standards for Apartments National Planning Statement under section 25 of the Planning and Development Act 2024. It replaces the July 2025 Design Standards for Apartments guidelines and applies to any planning application, appeal or direct application to An Coimisiún Pleanála determined after 4 November 2026. The ministers said it was issued to provide certainty and boost apartment delivery, strictly without prejudice to ongoing judicial review proceedings referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union; Sinn Féin's Eoin Ó Broin said the standards would result in "smaller and darker apartments" and that the minister was reissuing them hoping they would be less susceptible to challenge, while Social Democrats' Rory Hearne also criticised the reduction in apartment size and standards.

Source: Department of Housing (4 November 2026)

Wicklow grants permission for Vartry water storage upgrade

Wicklow County Council has granted Uisce Éireann conditional planning permission for the Vartry Security of Supply Project at the existing Vartry Waterworks south of the Vartry Reservoir. The scheme includes 60 megalitres of treated water storage in two new 30-megalitre structures, an underground dechlorination chamber, a bridge over the Vartry River, solar panels on both reservoir roofs and related works, with a 10-year permission duration. Conditions cover construction and environmental management, traffic, working hours, noise and archaeological monitoring; appeals may be made to An Coimisiún Pleanála.

Source: Irish Independent (4 November 2026)

Commission refuses 80 homes at St Ann's Hill, Tower, for inefficient density

An Coimisiún Pleanála has refused permission for OMD(C) Ltd's large-scale residential development of 55 houses and 25 apartments on the 11-hectare former St Ann's Hydropathic Establishment site at St Ann's Hill, Tower, Co Cork, despite an inspector's recommendation to grant and Cork City Council's earlier approval. The Cork City Development Plan sets a minimum of 35 dwellings per hectare and a target of 40–60 on greenfield outer-suburb sites; the proposal was about 17.3 dwellings per hectare. Commissioner Emer Maughan held that cultural and landscape constraints did not amount to exceptional circumstances to deviate so far from national, regional and local density ranges, and that the scheme would be an inefficient and unsustainable use of zoned serviced lands.

Source: Irish Examiner (2 November 2026)

Commission upholds refusal of 22 homes at Gingerstown Park, Naas

An Coimisiún Pleanála has upheld Kildare County Council's refusal of JJMS Properties Limited's residential scheme of 22 units at Gingerstown Park, Caragh, Naas, according to Construction Information Services. The December 2024 application comprised 16 houses and a part two-/part three-storey apartment block with six apartments, with pedestrian accesses off the R409 and Gingerstown Park and one vehicular access off Gingerstown Park. The council refused on 4 December 2025; the estimated scheme value cited is €5.5 million.

Source: Ireland Live (3 November 2026)

Record first-half social home builds as pipeline exceeds 22,000

The Department of Housing's Q2 2026 social housing delivery statistics show 2,731 new-build social homes constructed in the first six months of 2026, up 51 per cent on 1,804 in the same period of 2025 — the highest first-half figure on record. In Q2 alone, 2,008 new-build homes were delivered; with leasing, acquisitions, HAP and RAS, 4,320 housing supports were delivered in the quarter. The Construction Status Report showed 22,206 social homes at design or construction at end-June 2026, with 9,533 onsite and 12,673 at design or tender.

Source: Department of Housing (2 November 2026)

Yates warns housing output may slip after next year

Speaking on the State of Affairs podcast and reported by The Journal, Ivan Yates, chairman of developer Ingram Homes, said builders expect about 40,000 homes this year and a modest rise next year but fear a drop thereafter, putting the Government's 300,000 homes target for 2025–2030 at risk unless 2028–2029 hit 50,000-plus. He pointed to recent moves to cut council and housing-body purchases of developer-built turnkeys and reported uncertainty over Approved Housing Body partnerships. Housing charities Clúid and Focus Ireland and consultancy Deloitte have also voiced concerns; the Department of Housing is expected to meet AHBs and issue a circular, and the minister has denied any AHB cap.

Source: The Journal (2 November 2026)

Ten four-bed homes sought on former apartment site in Buncrana

Maherinture Developments Ltd has lodged an application with Donegal County Council for 10 two-storey four-bedroom semi-detached houses at Magherinture, at the entrance to the Páirc na hAlúine estate in Buncrana, with connections to public services and associated site works. The same site had 2008 permission for 12 apartments that were never built. Planning documents state an agreement in principle that Donegal County Council would purchase two of the 10 homes; a decision is expected by 16 December 2026.

Source: Donegal Live (1 November 2026)