Most people who deal with Irish planning meet it first as a prohibition. You may not develop land, save under and in accordance with a permission. That rule, now so familiar that it feels like weather, is younger than many practising planners. It took statutory form in the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1963, and it began to bind the country on 1 October 1964. The question this piece tries to answer is how Ireland moved, in a little over two centuries, from a world in which almost nobody needed the State's leave to build, to one in which nearly every material change on land does. The arc is not a smooth progress from darkness into light. It is a story of private estates and a Georgian street commission, of Victorian sanitary law, of a civic whirlwind that never became a statute, of an adoptive Act that almost nobody finished using, and finally of a mandatory system that was, by design, far more controlling than anything that had gone before.
What existed before a planning system
Ireland did not wait for a Planning Act to shape its towns. In Dublin the most famous pre-statutory instrument was the Wide Streets Commission, established by Act of Parliament in 1757 as the Commissioners for Making Wide and Convenient Ways, Streets and Passages in the City of Dublin. Dublin City Archives still hold its minutes, maps and architectural drawings. The Commission could acquire property by compulsory purchase, demolish it, lay out new streets and lease building lots to developers. It created Parliament Street, widened Dame Street, built Carlisle Bridge (now O'Connell Bridge), and laid out Westmoreland Street and D'Olier Street. It also regulated façades along the new lines: height, terrace rhythm, materials and the spacing of windows. Doors and fanlights were left freer, which is why Georgian Dublin can look uniform from a distance and individual up close. After the Union the Commission's money dried up; it was abolished under the Dublin Improvement Act 1849 and its powers passed to the municipal corporation from 1851. Parallel to that public machinery ran the private planning of the great estates, Gardiner and Fitzwilliam among them, which fixed so much of the city's street pattern without any modern development plan.
Nineteenth-century statute law then gave local authorities sanitary and housing powers rather than a general right to say yes or no to development. The Housing of the Working Classes Acts allowed clearance of unhealthy areas and the provision of dwellings. What Ireland did not get was Britain's first general town-planning statute. The Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1909 empowered English and Scottish authorities to make town-planning schemes, then ended with a short exclusion that still surprises students: "This Act shall not extend to Ireland." Michael J. Bannon's account of the genesis of modern Irish planning puts the exclusion in its legislative context: the planning clauses rode on a housing Bill that was broadly similar to the Housing of the Working Classes (Ireland) Act 1908, so Ireland was left out (Bannon, p. 191). The planning ideal nonetheless crossed the Irish Sea. Bannon records that a "vibrant and promising town-planning movement" existed in Dublin until 1916 (Bannon, p. 191). When Irish reformers spoke of town planning in the 1910s, they were arguing for a power their neighbours already had and they did not.
The gap: Geddes, the H.T.P.A.I. and a city without a statute
That gap is where the story thickens. Late nineteenth-century Ireland had seen gradual improvement in urban sanitary law, municipal reform and working-class housing, but Bannon's verdict is that it remained "piecemeal and largely unco-ordinated" and "devoid of any overall organising plan" (Bannon, p. 191). Dublin's death rates stayed high; typhoid epidemics marked the 1880s and 1890s; among the labouring classes some two-fifths of deaths were of children under five (Bannon, pp. 191–192). At the turn of the century at least 20,000 Dublin families still occupied one-room tenements, and voluntary and artisan-dwelling companies could not build enough houses at rents the average workman could pay (Bannon, p. 192). Planning, when it arrived as an idea, was still almost exclusively a way of talking about the housing question (Bannon, p. 192).
The catalyst was Patrick Geddes. In 1911, at the invitation of the Viceroy and Lady Aberdeen, he brought his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition to Dublin. It opened at the Royal Dublin Society in Ballsbridge from 24 May to 7 June, directed by Geddes with Frank Mears as assistant, and was later re-erected at Trinity College during the Royal Institute of Public Health Congress of 15–21 August (Bannon, pp. 196–197, 200). Attendance at the first showing was put at about 160,000 (Bannon, p. 199). Geddes preached "conservative surgery" of derelict corners and small gardens rather than Haussmannian clearance (Bannon, pp. 199–200). One direct consequence was a campaign, with Nora Geddes and the Women's National Health Association, to turn derelict sites into children's gardens (Bannon, p. 201). The other was institutional: the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland (H.T.P.A.I.), formed on 30 September 1911 with its inaugural meeting on 27 November, Lady Aberdeen as president and offices in Ely Place (Bannon, pp. 201–202).
The Association's first object was to educate public opinion. A Cork branch followed in February 1913. It urged civic surveys in the Geddesian manner - maps, air photographs, relief models, traffic diagrams - and pressed municipalities by persuasion because the 1909 Act gave them no planning power (Bannon, pp. 203–204). Lectures ran through Belfast, Cork and Dublin. In the spring of 1914 John Nolen and Raymond Unwin spoke on the replanning of Dublin; Unwin urged the city to plan "on a grand scale" and "as though no private interests were involved" (Bannon, pp. 205–206). An H.T.P.A.I. conference at the R.D.S. on 23 October 1912 resolved that urban authorities face "the urgent problems of housing and the economic planning of urban and other areas throughout Ireland" (Bannon, p. 206).
Then came the shock that made the argument concrete. In 1913 the collapse of a Dublin slum street helped force a Departmental Committee of Inquiry into housing conditions. The figures Bannon draws from it are still hard to read lightly: in 1911 some 22.9 per cent of Dublin's population lived in one-roomed tenements; by 1913 there were 518 "third-class" tenements unfit for human habitation, holding 6,831 families (22,701 persons), with tens of thousands more in only marginally better "second-class" rooms; roughly 60,000 people needed rehousing (Bannon, p. 207). The committee favoured suburban building on "virgin soil" on the outskirts rather than reoccupation of the old streets (Bannon, p. 208). E.A. Aston, a founder of the H.T.P.A.I., told the inquiry that Dublin lacked a "general plan of city development" and proposed a joint housing authority for city, townships and county, with a civic survey of "the whole natural community of Dublin" (Bannon, p. 209). Geddes gave evidence for the Women's National Health Association; he condemned segregated rows of two-roomed dwellings as future slums, praised small open spaces over grandiose parks, and argued that many necessary improvements required "an extension of powers by means of an improved Town Planning Act" (Bannon, pp. 210–212). J.F. McCabe of the Local Government Board, in a memorandum that The Irish Builder and Engineer applauded, insisted that building before a civic survey and town plan was a "grave misfortune" (Bannon, p. 213).
Momentum, not statute, followed. In January 1914 the Aberdeens and the H.T.P.A.I. launched a Civic Exhibition and an international competition for a plan of Greater Dublin. The exhibition ran for six weeks from 15 July to 31 August 1914 at the Linenhall Buildings and the grounds of the King's Inns; opening day saw some 9,000 visitors; Abercrombie later recalled that he had "never seen anything more remarkable in all my life," while The Irish Worker dismissed it as "Lady Microbe's Civic Farce" (Bannon, p. 216). A broadly based Civic Exhibition Committee drew in the H.T.P.A.I., the R.I.A.I., the engineers, the Chamber of Commerce and others; Geddes was the prime mover and Nolen the manager (Bannon, p. 215). From that committee grew the Civics Institute of Ireland, which on 30 June 1916 formally took over the H.T.P.A.I.'s functions and remained active for almost thirty years (Bannon, p. 215). Among the Institute's later achievements Bannon lists the Dublin of the Future competition, civic surveys of Dublin and Cork, housing weeks and conferences - and, with the R.I.A.I., the promotion of a Town Planning and Rural Amenities Bill in the Senate (Bannon, p. 215).
On 10 August 1914, on the Lord Mayor's proposal, Dublin Corporation voted 27 to 8 to have Patrick Geddes and Raymond Unwin review its central clearance schemes at Beresford Street, Church Street, Ormond Market and Trinity Ward (Bannon, p. 221). Their report, sent from Hampstead on 26 September, pressed lower densities, play space and garden-suburb solutions, including Marino (Bannon, pp. 222–224). On 5 October Councillor W.T. Cosgrave moved that the schemes proceed as planned, and Bannon's judgment is that the report had little effect on them (Bannon, p. 226). The competition itself, with a £500 prize given by the Marquis of Aberdeen and Temair, asked for a Greater Dublin plan taking in Howth, Glasnevin, Ashtown, Dundrum and Dalkey, and for proposals to house the Inquiry's 14,000 new dwellings alongside communications and metropolitan improvements. War delayed adjudication until 1916. The prize went to Patrick Abercrombie with Sydney and Arthur Kelly. Thomas Adams wrote a separate assessment of the entries. The winning scheme was published in 1922 as Dublin of the Future.
Abercrombie's Irish Act, and a false dawn
What matters for the legislative story is that Abercrombie and his partners already saw the need for Irish statute, and that they did not want a carbon copy of the 1909 Act. In the published report they sketch a Housing and Town Planning Act for the whole country, built around a central Town Planning Commission and local boards preparing schemes for Parliament - "more a Commission on Town Planning" than the English model, because "the relative conditions are not the same." "Indeed if it is the first act of legislation which proceeds from her newly-formed Parliament," they wrote, "it will be a fitting opening to an honourable career." Bannon's reading of that call, and of the surrounding debate, places it at the heart of the pre-independence agenda (Bannon, pp. 239–240). Adams, for his part, pressed the case for a Greater Dublin Planning Commission (Bannon, pp. 239–240). The Institute's foreword to Dublin of the Future is touching in its hopes: with the recent change in national circumstances a new epoch had begun, and this was "a most opportune time to arouse the interest of the Citizens". The adjudicators, Geddes, Charles McCarthy and John Nolen, had taken care not to endorse every proposal. The authors themselves treated the plan as a starting point and a quarry of ideas rather than a finished ordinance.
It was not the first Act of the new State. Bannon's verdict on the whole pre-1916 "whirlwind of planning promotion" is that it was a false dawn, and that the results in the new State were "limited and long delayed" (Bannon, pp. 241–242). For more than a decade the Free State managed without a general planning system. The Civics Institute kept at it: civic surveys in the mid-1920s, housing weeks, and that Senate Bill with the R.I.A.I. (Bannon, p. 215). Later Abercrombie, with Manning Robertson and the Kellys, prepared a sketch development plan for Dublin; Neil Blaney, introducing the 1962 Bill in the Dáil, dated that sketch to 1939 and said the Corporation's later planning scheme was based on it. The civic ideal was clear. The legal machinery was not yet there.
The adoptive Act of 1934
The Town and Regional Planning Act 1934, enacted on 29 May 1934, was Ireland's first general planning statute. Its long title promised "the orderly and progressive development of cities, towns, and other areas, whether urban or rural" and the preservation and improvement of amenities. Section 17 made every county borough, borough, urban district and county health district a planning district, with the relevant council as planning authority. The decisive feature was that the Act was adoptive. Under section 26 a planning authority could, by a specially notified resolution passed by more than half its members, decide to make a planning scheme for its district or part of it. Once that resolution was passed, the authority could not lawfully revoke it, and interim control began.
That interim control is the hinge of the whole story. Section 57 allowed the authority, after the resolution and before any scheme came into operation, to grant permissions for the construction, demolition, alteration or extension of structures, to attach conditions, and to prohibit work already under way. If it failed to decide a permission application within two months, the application was deemed granted. Section 59 gave any person aggrieved by a grant, refusal or prohibition a right of appeal to the Minister. Compensation for interim restrictions was, in the main, postponed until a scheme was in force. The Town and Regional Planning (Amendment) Act 1939, enacted on 31 May 1939, tried to ease some of the rigidities: it dealt with road plans, density units, special prohibitions and appeals, and sought to relieve authorities of the obligation to plan their entire area in one go. It did not change the adoptive character of the legislation.
Control without a plan
By the early 1960s the results were plain enough to be recited in the Dáil. On 31 January 1963 the Minister's Department told the House that 4,037 valid appeals had been made under section 59 of the 1934 Act: 790 allowed, 435 allowed subject to conditions, 1,425 disallowed and 1,030 withdrawn. A long list of authorities had passed resolutions to make schemes. Exactly one, Dublin Corporation, had ever submitted a scheme for approval. And because no planning scheme had been brought into operation anywhere, no application under the enforcement provisions that depended on an operative scheme could even be made. Irish people were already living under interim planning control, seeking permission and appealing refusals, without a finished plan to tell them what the rules were meant to secure.
When Neil Blaney moved the Second Stage of the Local Government (Planning and Development) Bill, 1962, in the Dáil on 22 November 1962, and again in the Seanad on 31 July 1963, he made no effort to defend that record. The 1934 and 1939 Acts, he said, were adoptive; their procedures were "so lengthy and cumbersome that local authorities were deterred from producing comprehensive planning schemes"; only Dublin had prepared a scheme, and even that had not come into force because of defects that "stemmed from inherent weaknesses in the enabling legislation". "Probably the greatest defect of the Acts," he told the Seanad, "was that they failed to stimulate a positive approach to planning." Compensation was tangled up with the coming into force of a scheme; betterment had proved almost impossible to collect (he cited the English experience of only three recorded instances under similar provisions); and the powers were "largely regulatory" when what cities now needed was the ability to assemble land and renew obsolete centres. He was also frank that interim control, intended as a short bridge to a scheme, had become the permanent weather of the system.
The 1963 Act: obligation, definition, permission
The Local Government (Planning and Development) Act 1963, signed on 7 August 1963, repealed the 1934 and 1939 Acts and replaced them with legislation whose long title still sets the tone of Irish planning: provision "in the interests of the common good" for the proper planning and development of cities, towns and other areas. S.I. No. 211/1964 appointed 1 October 1964 as the appointed day. From that date, subject to limited exceptions for building-regulation sections, the new system applied.
Three features made it controlling in a way the 1934 Act never was.
First, the development plan became an obligation. Section 19 required every planning authority, within three years of the appointed day (or such longer period as the Minister might allow), to make a plan indicating development objectives for their area. The plan was to be a written statement and a plan. For cities and towns the minimum objectives included zoning of land for particular purposes, road safety and parking, renewal of obsolete areas, and the preservation and improvement of amenities. For other areas the minima were renewal, amenity, and water and sewerage. Making the plan was a reserved function of the elected members. The Minister's approval of each plan was deliberately dropped; Blaney wanted the Department free to advise rather than to confirm.
Second, "development" was defined widely. Section 3 made it the carrying out of any works on, in or under land, or the making of any material change in the use of any structures or other land. Use of land for advertisements, caravanning, camping, storage of caravans or the deposit of waste was deemed a material change. So was the use as two or more dwellings of a structure previously used as a single dwelling. The 1934 interim regime had controlled structures; the 1963 Act reached use as well. Blaney told the Dáil that the omission of use control in the interim period had been an anomaly born of the hope that schemes would arrive quickly. They had not, and "much harm" had been done.
Third, permission became the general rule. Section 24 is the clause every planner still carries in their head: subject to the Act, permission is required for any development of land that is neither exempted development nor commenced before the appointed day, and for the retention of structures that were unauthorised on that day. A person shall not carry out such development save under and in accordance with a permission. Contravention was a summary offence. Section 26 then set the criteria for deciding applications: the planning authority was restricted to considering the proper planning and development of its area, including amenities, regard being had to the development plan and to any special amenity area order. Reasons had to be stated for refusals and conditions. Any person could appeal to the Minister. Outline permission, public notice of applications, and a public register of decisions were contemplated in the permission regulations. Enforcement notices, tree preservation and conservation orders, special amenity area orders, and positive powers to acquire and redevelop land for urban renewal completed a machinery that was no longer waiting for an optional scheme.
Compensation was reworked so that claims followed individual refusals or conditions rather than the coming into force of a rigid scheme, and betterment charges of the old kind were effectively abandoned. "Property carries obligations as well as rights," Blaney told the Seanad, pointing to the Constitution's delimitation of private property by law. The phrase has been quoted ever since, sometimes as a threat and sometimes as a defence. In context it was the Minister's answer to why a State that had spent a generation giving farmers freehold title through the land acts was now asserting a general veto over the use of land.
Why it felt, and was, so controlling
The jump from 1934 to 1963 is easy to misread as a simple modernisation. It was more than that. The old Act invited councils to enter planning; the new Act required them to. The old Act controlled buildings in the interim and postponed most of the hard reckoning until a scheme arrived that almost never did; the new Act made permission the ordinary condition of development from day one, for works and for material changes of use, across the State. Appeals stayed with the Minister, so the centre of the system remained political for another thirteen years until An Bord Pleanála was created. Positive powers of land assembly for urban renewal, which Blaney had studied in North America, sat beside amenity controls designed for a growing tourist economy. The model owed much to British post-war planning legislation, even though Irish land politics were not the same - and even though Abercrombie, half a century earlier, had already warned against copying the 1909 Act.
Looked at across the longer arc, the 1963 Act is also the delayed answer to the false dawn Bannon describes. Between 1911 and 1916 Dublin had exhibitions, an association, an inquiry, a civic week, a competition and a published plan calling for an Irish Act with a central commission. What it did not get was the Act. What it got, after another generation of adoptive half-measures, was a system that did not wait to be invited in. Senator James Dooge, welcoming the Bill in the Seanad, put his finger on the problem the statute could not solve. The 1934 Act had failed not only procedurally but "in regard to public opinion": "There was a lack of involvement and a lack of participation on the part of the public." His remedy remains the best short summary of what the 1963 Act could create and what it could not: "There must be found a way in which there will be a public sanction for planning." The Oireachtas could, and did, make development without permission an offence. It could not legislate the consent underneath. That is why the system that began on 1 October 1964 still feels, to applicants and objectors alike, like a controlling system: because that is exactly what its authors set out to build, after fifty years in which a civic campaign and then a gentler, adoptive Act had planned and controlled without ever quite closing the circle from idea to binding law.
Further reading
M.J. Bannon (ed.), The Emergence of Irish Planning, 1880–1920 (Turoe Press, Dublin, 1985), especially Michael J. Bannon, "The Genesis of Modern Irish Planning," pp. 189–262: NLI catalogue (https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000119269)
Town and Regional Planning Act, 1934 (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1934/act/22/enacted/en/html) (No. 22 of 1934)
Town and Regional Planning (Amendment) Act, 1939 (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1939/act/11/enacted/en/html) (No. 11 of 1939)
Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963 (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1963/act/28/enacted/en/html) (No. 28 of 1963)
Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963, (Appointed Day) Order, 1964 (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1964/si/211/made/en/html) (S.I. No. 211/1964)
Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act, 1909 (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1909/act/44/enacted/en/print.html) (note s.76: "This Act shall not extend to Ireland.")
Dáil Éireann, Local Government (Planning and Development) Bill, 1962 - Second Stage (https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1962-11-22/113/), 22 November 1962 (Neil Blaney)
Seanad Éireann, Local Government (Planning and Development) Bill, 1962 - Second Stage (https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1963-07-31/6/), 31 July 1963 (Blaney; James Dooge)
Dáil Éireann, Oral Answers - Town Planning (https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1963-01-31/24/), 31 January 1963 (appeals and planning resolutions under the 1934 Act)
Dublin of the Future (https://centuryireland.rte.ie/centuryireland/images/uploads/further-reading/Ed92-DublinOfTheFuture1.pdf), Patrick Abercrombie, Sydney Kelly and Arthur Kelly (Civics Institute of Ireland, 1922)
Wide Streets Commission (https://iar.ie/archive/wide-streets-commission/) archive description, Dublin City Archives
Planning: The Irish Experience 1920–1988, edited by Michael J. Bannon (Wolfhound Press, 1989), including Kevin Nowlan, "The Evolution of Irish Planning, 1934–1964": NLI catalogue (https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000087776)
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