This is an editorial article from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
There is a particular kind of planning document that nobody outside the profession ever reads and almost everybody inside it has written: the environmental impact assessment screening report. It runs to dozens of pages, costs real money, and in the overwhelming majority of ordinary housing schemes it concludes, after a careful march through soils, water, biodiversity, traffic and cultural heritage, that a full assessment is not required. The Department of Housing has now published draft regulations under which housing schemes of up to 250 homes would no longer need formal screening at all, and it is worth asking, calmly and without slogans, what is actually being given up and what is being gained.
What officials have taken to calling a traffic light system would work like this. Up to 250 units is green, and no formal screening is needed; between 250 and 750 is amber, and the scheme is screened; above 750 is red, and a full assessment is mandatory. Easy to miss is that the point at which assessment becomes compulsory, 500 homes for more than twenty years, would rise by half. Similar exclusion thresholds are proposed for overhead electricity lines, private roads and wastewater treatment plants below 10,000 population equivalent, which should help Uisce Éireann with the unglamorous upgrades so many towns are waiting on. None of it applies until Part 4 of the Planning and Development Act 2024 is commenced, which awaits the end of the council work-to-rule.
What most of the coverage has skated past is that green does not mean unexamined. Section 225 of the 2024 Act requires the council, for any scheme below an exclusion threshold, to examine its nature and location and to move to screening if the possibility of significant effects cannot be excluded. What disappears is the obligation on the developer to commission and submit the formal screening material, not the obligation on the State to look.
The Government's case is that this removes duplication. Minister of State John Cummins argues that environmental screening already happens when land is zoned, and that the lack of exclusion thresholds meant everything was being screened. The second claim is fair in practice, if not quite in law: the 2001 Regulations already required only a preliminary examination below the 500-unit line, but many applicants, knowing where judicial reviews are won and lost, have long submitted full screening reports as a matter of course. A study published with the Department's consultation found that fewer than one per cent of schemes below 250 homes ended up with a full assessment. Engineers Ireland, the Chartered Institute of Building and Cork Chamber all supported exclusion thresholds in the consultation, though the engineers wanted sensitive locations and cumulative effects still covered and the builders' institute wanted councils resourced to do the work. Sean O'Driscoll of the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce has compared Ireland's 2022 tally with 217 in Germany and eight in Denmark, though the Irish figure has been reported as both 257 assessments and 237 screenings, which is not a small difference in a debate about precision.
The objections deserve the same seriousness. Eoin Ó Broin of Sinn Féin spoke of a sense of déjà vu about light-touch regulation, and the Green Party's Malcolm Noonan has warned that flood plains, hedgerows and archaeology could be overlooked. Here the law is not on anyone's side so much as on its own. Zoning-stage assessment under the SEA Directive is expressly without prejudice to project assessment, and the European Court of Justice has held, against Ireland itself over peat extraction and land reclamation, that a threshold based on size alone, blind to nature and location, exceeds what the Directive permits. More recently it found Vienna's urban development thresholds set so high that most projects were excluded in advance. The new examination is what keeps the Irish system on the right side of that line, which is why it cannot be allowed to become a formality. Appropriate assessment under the Habitats Directive, the regime behind so many recent challenges, is untouched, and every scheme must still be screened for it.
My view is that the change is sensible in principle, and that its legality and its value rest on one thing: a nature and location examination done properly, by councils with the ecologists and resources to do it. If that happens, few outside the consultancies will mourn the routine screening report. If it does not, the time saved at the front of the process will be lost again at the back, in the courts, where Irish housing has already spent too much of the last decade.
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