Material Considerations: Seams, Not Seamlessness - Planning Data in Ireland

Material Considerations, 7 November 2026

Seams, Not Seamlessness: Planning Data in Ireland

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only. Material Considerations is a Saturday series on the research and academic underpinnings of planning: peer-reviewed work and scholarly debate, read for what they can offer professional practice.

In British academic geography around the turn of the millennium, a lively argument opened about the discipline’s relationship to public policy. Ron Martin’s 2001 essay in Progress in Human Geography, “Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda”, argued for a stronger contribution from geographical research to public policy. The exchange that followed was not a simple demand that academics be useful. It raised questions about how different kinds of research could contribute to policy and practice. Shin Kajita’s 2012 review in the Geographical Review of Japan, “Policy (Re)turn Debate in British Geography”, later traced that discussion across the journals and emphasised both high-quality research and effective ways of communicating it to those who make and apply policy. Material Considerations takes up that question for planning. Each Saturday we take a piece of research or debate, weigh its evidence and limits, and ask what it offers Irish planning practice.

Irish planning reform only works if planners, applicants and the public are looking at sufficiently reliable facts. Mandatory decision timelines, changes to judicial review and the revised National Planning Framework’s need to plan for approximately 50,000 additional housing units a year to 2040 all assume that the underlying information can be trusted for evidence and oversight. Most debate has focused on legislation and court procedure. A smaller body of peer-reviewed work from Maynooth University’s Data Stories project asks a different question: what do the digital systems underneath development control actually look like, and where do their joins fail?

The word the Maynooth team put into circulation is seamful, not seamless. The difference is the whole point. What follows is a practitioner reading of those published papers, checked against official building-control and planning sources where the wording matters. It is not new fieldwork by BPS Planning.

Why this matters now

The Planning and Development Act 2024 is being brought in by stages. A widely trailed switchover to new consenting arrangements had been indicated for 30 September 2026. On 9 October 2026 the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage advised that commencement of the remaining parts of the Act was deferred, that a new date would be notified, and that the Planning and Development Act 2000 (as amended) continues to operate in the meantime. Reform framing remains live. What does not remain live is any assumption that a fixed switchover has already happened.

Housing ambition remains live too. The first revision of the National Planning Framework, approved in April 2025, sets out a need to plan for roughly 50,000 additional homes a year to 2040. That scale of delivery, and the oversight that goes with it, depends on planning and building-control data that can be linked, compared and trusted. If the joins between systems are weak, the evidence base for both applications and policy is weaker than the rhetoric suggests.

Seamful, not seamless

A seamless system hides its joins. The user sees one interface and never learns that it stitches together several agencies, formats and definitions. Seamful design keeps the joins visible so people can see where data came from, how they were combined and where they may fail. In the Irish development-control case, the Maynooth papers give that idea a concrete meaning: seams are the points of contact between systems; shared identifiers, metadata and standards help data cross them; frictions (incompatible formats, manual work, legal limits, institutional resistance) hinder them. Some frictions are deliberate, for privacy or security. Many are not.

The companion idea is indexical data: shared reference numbers that would let the same development be tracked from pre-planning through application, appeal and building control. Their absence is a seam that does not hold.

A further Maynooth framing is useful for practitioners under pressure: digitalisation under ongoing operational load often produces systems that are “good enough” to discharge statutory tasks without being optimal for statistics, open data or Freedom of Information. That is not praise for mediocrity. It is a warning against solutionism that promises seamless perfection and underestimates the labour of joins.

What the Maynooth research found

The Data Stories work, funded by the European Research Council and the Local Government Management Agency, is based on interviews with 29 public-sector officials in summer 2023, audits of core IT systems and a genealogy of digitalisation from 2000 to 2024. The published papers, mainly from 2025, converge on a few clear claims.

First, digital planning data tend to replicate and proliferate rather than flow cleanly from one place to another. Copies multiply across management systems, public ePlan-type sites, national products, appeals systems, open-data releases and commercial reuse, often transformed by cleaning and enrichment as they go.

Second, the ecosystem was built piecemeal. Dublin authorities adopted APAS around 2000; iPlan followed from 2002; ePlan, the Building Control Management System (BCMS), the National Planning Application Database (NPAD), Plean-IT, PACE and the planning.localgov.ie portal arrived in later waves. There was no single long-term blueprint. Early digitalisation largely reproduced paper processes in digital form.

Third, nobody holds the whole picture. The ecosystem operates without a single body in charge, and many interviewees did not know how their own organisation’s data work fitted the rest. Tension between local authorities and the Department over autonomy and resourcing adds friction.

Fourth, the wider arrangement is best understood as an assemblage of assemblages: each system is socio-technical, and the national picture is those systems joined, unevenly, by seams.

Where the seams show

Start with NPAD. In the Maynooth account it is a national map drawing up to 25 summary fields from local ePlan-type sites through an automated extract process (PETaL). Treat it as an index, not the file. Coverage wording differs between sources: the researchers describe applications since 2012; the data.gov.ie listing for national-planning-applications gives a begin date of 1 January 2010 and a release date in October 2017. Say which product you used.

Behind that national view sit the planning application management systems. At the August 2023 fieldwork snapshot:

iPlan was in use in 24 local authorities, with 65 required fields (without duplicates).

Odyssey was in use in 2 local authorities, with 40 required fields.

APAS was in use in 5 local authorities, with 21 required fields. The five APAS installations also differed from one another in design and workflow; counting that customisation, the researchers effectively treat the State as running seven distinct configurations.

Those figures are historical. By August 2024 the Maynooth follow-up recorded the two Cork authorities moving from Odyssey to APAS. System maps age quickly.

The same research returns repeatedly to six practical frictions.

No shared ID across stages. A scheme can carry separate references at pre-planning, planning, appeal and building control, which makes pipeline tracking hard.

Manual extraction. Planning application systems were not built as national reporting engines. One account is of a planning officer spending about a week each month extracting data for Central Statistics Office returns; another describes administrators opening cases by hand and heavy cleaning afterwards at the CSO.

Specialist applications outside the main systems. In some authorities, applications under Sections 5, 35, 42, 44, 57 and 247 and Parts V, VII/VIII and XI of the planning legislation are handled partly in spreadsheets, SharePoint or GIS rather than in the standard management system.

Paper at the edges in 2023. Twelve authorities still required paper applications at the August 2023 snapshot; An Bord Pleanála remained paper-based for statutory reasons even while using Plean-IT. Later Maynooth follow-up records a rapid fall in paper-only authorities. The appeals body is now An Coimisiún Pleanála; current filing practice after the rename has not been re-audited for this piece.

Self-reported building-control data, and a precise opt-out. BCMS entries are made by builders, architects and other professionals, often into free-text fields, which the researchers flag as a quality and standardisation problem. Separately, owners of a new single dwelling on a single development site, or of a domestic extension greater than 40 square metres, may opt out of statutory certification (assigned certifier and Certificate of Compliance on Completion). Official Department guidance is clear: that is not a blanket opt-out from building control or from BCMS. Commencement notices and related BCMS processes still apply, and compliance with the Building Regulations remains obligatory. Where research text speaks loosely of opting out of “BCMS tracking”, that compression should not be read as the law.

Unofficial seams. Private firms scrape ePlan and BCMS on daily or weekly cycles and sell enriched products. Those commercial copies are another version of the same underlying facts, not a neutral mirror.

The Maynooth papers also describe reform talk current at the time of writing: a review of BCMS proposing shared identifiers and less free text, and LGMA/Department scoping toward a more standardised national development-and-control arrangement, illustrated as a possible 2027 picture if approved. Whether those proposals have advanced since publication is not independently confirmed here.

What practitioners should do with this

None of the following is new empirical research. It is what follows if you take the published seams seriously.

Track every identifier. Keep a crosswalk of pre-planning, planning, appeal and building-control references in the evidence trail.

Treat national viewers as indexes. Confirm figures against the planning authority’s own file.

Name the version. State the source, the system and the extraction date beside each data-driven claim. Official, open and commercial copies diverge.

Know what sits outside standard systems, and what an opt-out does and does not mean. Specialist application types can leave gaps in pipeline counts. For building control, distinguish free-text data-quality problems from the narrower statutory-certification opt-out; commencement and BCMS procedures, and Building Regulations duties, still apply.

Check appeal-stage practice afresh. Do not assume 2023 paper practice at An Bord Pleanála still describes An Coimisiún Pleanála.

Expect reform to move seams, not erase them. Deferred commencement of the 2024 Act and any future national system will change where records are created. Comparisons across the transition need extra care.

Treat “good enough” as a warning against solutionism. Incremental fixes and AI tools should be judged on credibility and legitimacy, not on marketing claims of seamlessness.

Closing

On the published Maynooth evidence, Irish development-control data are not a seamless machine. They are a seamful assemblage, built over a quarter-century of piecemeal digitalisation. Data replicate, proliferate and diverge. Joins are uneven, sometimes deliberate and often fragile. As the State pursues housing targets and continues, as of October 2026, to reschedule elements of the 2024 Act, those seams matter. Transparency in planning is only as strong as the visibility of its data joins.

That is the point of starting Material Considerations with research rather than with the week’s headlines. Scholarship that stays sealed from practice helps nobody; practice that ignores its academic underpinnings invents the wheel badly. Next Saturday continues the series on another piece of the research that planning rests on.

Sources

Ron Martin (2001), Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda, Progress in Human Geography 25(2), 189–210 (https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580476)

Shin Kajita (2012), Policy (Re)turn Debate in British Geography, Geographical Review of Japan Series A 85(4), 362–382 (https://doi.org/10.4157/grj.85.362)

Kitchin, Davret, Kayanan and Mutter (2025), Genealogy of a data ecosystem, Digital Geography and Society (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100124)

Kitchin, Davret, Kayanan and Mutter (2025), Assemblage theory, data systems and data ecosystems, Big Data & Society (https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251352822)

Kitchin, Davret, Kayanan and Mutter (2025), Data mobilities, Mobilities (https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309)

Kayanan, Mutter, Davret and Kitchin (2025), The digital turn and ‘good enough’ planning systems, European Planning Studies (https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2025.2599869)

Government of Ireland (2025), National Planning Framework: First Revision (April 2025) (https://www.npf.ie/wp-content/uploads/National-Planning-Framework-First-Revision-April-2025-1.pdf)

Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage (30 April 2025), Revised NPF approved by Oireachtas (https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/revised-national-planning-framework-now-approved-by-oireachtas/)

Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage (9 October 2026), Deferral of remaining Planning and Development Act commencement (https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/circulars/deferral-of-the-commencement-of-the-planning-and-development-act/)

Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Building Control (statutory certification opt-out guidance) (https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/publications/building-control/)

data.gov.ie, national-planning-applications dataset metadata (https://data.gov.ie/dataset/national-planning-applications)

Vertesi (2014), Seamful spaces, Science, Technology, & Human Values (https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243913516012)

Inman and Ribes (2018), Data streams, data seams, Design Research Society (https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2018/researchpapers/16)

Planner’s Take, 7 November 2026

Two wind farm refusals in north Galway point to the need for plan-led siting

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

An Coimisiún Pleanála has refused permission for the nine-turbine Cooloo wind farm, proposed by Neoen Renewables Ireland on about 739 acres around Barnaderg and Moylough in north Galway. The Commission gave four reasons, relating to environmental, ecological, hydrological and peatland concerns. It is the second large wind project in that part of the county to be refused in a matter of weeks, after the 11-turbine Shancloon scheme was turned down in September. Two more strategic infrastructure applications nearby, at Laurclavagh and Clonberne, were lodged in 2024 and are still awaiting decisions.

It would be easy to read this as a planning system standing in the way of the energy transition. That reading is too quick. A refusal on peatland and hydrological grounds is not an obstacle invented by planners; it reflects some of the hardest lessons Irish wind development has had to learn. The peat slide at Derrybrien in south Galway in 2003, during construction of a wind farm, led to years of litigation and to the Court of Justice of the European Union imposing a lump sum and daily penalties on Ireland for failing to carry out a proper environmental impact assessment. Peat is not just ground to be built on. It stores carbon, holds water, supports habitats and, when disturbed badly, can move. A wind farm that damages a bog can undo part of the climate benefit it was meant to deliver.

That is why the Commission's reasons matter. Under EU law, a project of this kind requires environmental impact assessment. Where likely significant effects on a European site cannot be excluded, appropriate assessment under the Habitats Directive is also required. The ordinary consent test requires adverse effects on the integrity of that site to be ruled out; any derogation is subject to separate, strict legal conditions. The Commission must also, under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 as amended, perform its functions, in so far as practicable, consistently with the climate action plan and national climate objectives. Climate objectives do not displace the requirements of environmental assessment and habitat protection. Nothing in climate legislation requires a grant on a poorly chosen site.

The more uncomfortable question is why so much effort is being spent on applications that fail. Developers prepare environmental reports, peat stability assessments and hydrological studies, communities mobilise, and the Commission spends many months on each file, only for two schemes in one district to be refused on site-specific environmental grounds. That is costly for everyone, and it does nothing for national targets for onshore wind. The underlying problem is that Ireland still sites most wind farms developer by developer, under wind energy guidelines dating from 2006, with county development plans offering broad designations of areas open to consideration rather than a clear national picture of where turbines should and should not go.

There is a fair counter-argument. Developers know their sites, and a plan-led approach risks long delays while maps are drawn and challenged. Some will also say the Commission has become too cautious, and that a run of refusals sends a poor signal to investors at the very moment the State needs more renewable generation. Those concerns deserve a hearing. But the alternative to careful planning is not faster delivery; it is more refusals, more judicial reviews and more communities who feel that each application is a contest rather than part of a coherent strategy.

The revised EU Renewable Energy Directive points the way. It requires member states to designate renewables acceleration areas, places where environmental sensitivity has been assessed at plan level and where projects can then move faster. Done properly, that approach would steer wind energy away from deep peat, sensitive catchments and protected habitats, and towards land where the environmental case has already been made. It would also give communities an earlier and more meaningful say, at the plan stage rather than application by application.

For practitioners, the lesson from north Galway is practical. Peat depth, slope stability, drainage and downstream water quality need to be understood before site selection, not justified afterwards in an environmental report. For councils, wind energy strategies in development plans should be specific enough to be useful. For Government, the long-promised update of the wind energy guidelines, together with acceleration areas, should be treated as part of the climate programme, not an afterthought.

Ireland needs a great deal more onshore wind. It will get there faster by choosing better places for it, and the Cooloo decision is a reminder that the place matters as much as the turbine.

Irish Town Planner Planning News Roundup, 7 November 2026

Here is today's round-up of town planning news from around Ireland, covering the Land Development Agency's application for 564 apartments in Ballymun, An Coimisiún Pleanála's refusal of the nine-turbine Cooloo wind farm in north Galway, parking concerns over 359 homes approved at Woodbrook in south Dublin, 60 homes granted near Letterkenny, ten homes approved at Bealnamulla near Athlone, and a call to open the Vacant Above the Shop grant to company-owned buildings.

LDA lodges plans for 564 apartments in Ballymun

The Land Development Agency has submitted a planning application for 564 apartments in three blocks of six to 12 storeys in Ballymun, Dublin 11, with a childcare facility, arts, cultural and community spaces, communal and public open space, play areas and cycling infrastructure. The mix is 91 studios, 190 one-bed and 283 two-bed apartments: Block 1 (10 to 12 storeys) would have 253 homes, Block 2 (nine storeys) 90 and Block 3 (six to eight storeys) 221. Subject to permission, construction is targeted to start in the first half of 2028.

Source: RTÉ News (6 November 2026)

Commission refuses Cooloo wind farm in north Galway

An Coimisiún Pleanála has refused Neoen Renewables Ireland's strategic infrastructure application for the nine-turbine Cooloo Wind Farm on about 739 acres at Barnaderg and Moylough, on four grounds relating to environmental, ecological, hydrological and peatland concerns. It is the second large wind project in north Galway to be refused, after the 11-turbine Shancloon scheme in September. Decisions are still awaited on the Laurclavagh (eight turbines) and Clonberne (11 turbines) wind farm applications lodged in 2024.

Source: Tuam Herald (6 November 2026)

Parking concerns follow approval of 359 homes at Woodbrook DART

Residents of Woodbrook and Shanganagh Castle have raised concerns about parking and services after Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillors approved the Woodbrook DART Gateway scheme at their October meeting: 359 homes in two apartment blocks, one cost rental and the other social and affordable. The council says the scheme now has 191 car parking spaces, 54 more than first proposed, and that land constraints limited further provision. A motion passed at the same meeting called for at least 50 more spaces nearby, available for at least 10 years and delivered before any homes are occupied.

Source: Irish Independent (6 November 2026)

60 homes granted at Killyclug, Letterkenny

Donegal County Council has granted Cillanoir Developments Ltd permission for 60 homes at Killyclug, north-west of Letterkenny near Cluain Ard and Gleann Eadán: 45 four-bed, 13 three-bed and two two-bed houses, with six to transfer to the council at an agreed cost. The grant carries 28 conditions, including a development contribution of €120,000. The site previously had permission for 85 homes, extended in 2012.

Source: Donegal Live (6 November 2026)

Ten homes approved on Bealnamulla Road, Athlone

Roscommon County Council has granted Michael Mullaney permission, subject to 27 conditions, for ten homes on a greenfield site at Monksland/Bealnamulla off the L2047, linking into the internal streets of Larkfields Mews around a central open space. Conditions include social and affordable housing arrangements, restrictions prioritising individual purchasers and eligible tenants, a construction phasing plan, a €44,000 development contribution and a €44,000 bond for roads, footpaths, drainage and lighting.

Source: Westmeath Independent (6 November 2026)

Call to open Above the Shop grant to company-owned buildings

Fine Gael Senator Eileen Lynch has asked the Minister for Housing to extend the Vacant Above the Shop Grant under Croí Cónaithe to properties owned by companies, saying the current restriction to named individual owners and sole traders is limiting uptake. The grant provides up to €95,000 for one home, €115,000 for two and €135,000 for three or more above a commercial premises. She suggested conditions to protect public funding and ensure the homes are delivered and occupied.

Source: Cork Beo (6 November 2026)

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)