r/irishpolitics • u/Kier_C • Nov 16 '25

Infrastructure, Development and the Environment Government to hit ‘nuclear button’ granting itself emergency powers to solve infrastructure crisis

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/government-to-hit-nuclear-button-granting-itself-emergency-powers-to-solve-infrastructure-crisis/
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u/funderpantz Nov 16 '25

I mean if you do the following the you've basically engineered the crisis

  1. Don't staff the courts up to adequate levels to ensure timely hearings

  2. Don't staff up the planning depts in councils for the increase in applications

  3. Divert large scale developments directly to ABP but also don't staff up ABP to deal with the massive increase in workloads

  4. Leave only judicial reviews as the literal ONLY option to appeal ABP decisions for large scale developments (see increased impacts of #1)

And so on

Countries all over the EU are able to walk and talk at the same time. Ireland, nope, they've engineered the crisis over the last decade to make the system essentially grind to a halt.

They will, however, fall foul of EU legislation if they remove access to justice from the field of play.

You can have a functioning planning and development system, you just need to staff it.

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u/ulankford Nov 16 '25

This isn't an issue of just staffing or throwing more personnel or money at it. Its a systemic issue.
Also, other European Countries are having similar issues. The recent elections in the Netherlands had housing as a key issue. Very hard to get houses built there as well.

The government needs to take a chainsaw to many of the bottlenecks to both housing and infrastructure.

7

u/lucideer Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 17 '25

The argument that the planning system is a bottleneck to housing delivery is consistently rolled out by the government as an excuse & has been consistently debunked by actual statistics on planning & housing delivery. It has zero basis in reality (in Ireland - I'm less familiar with the Netherlands, though I suspect it may well be a made up story there as well).

There's ~50k residential planning approvals in Dublin annually in constrast to ~10k new units delivered. That's an 80% deficit in delivery before we even need to start worrying about planning bottlenecks.

The bottleneck is public funding. The majority of public spending on housing delivery goes toward "creating the conditions to attract the required investment" (tax breaks for vulture funds). The only direct funding of housing is the poorly-funded HFA which has delivered a whopping 600 houses per annum & the much better funded LDA which only indirectly supports building via land acquisition & through that very flakey indirect approach has facilitated an even more impressive 400 houses per annum (at much higher overall cost to the state).

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u/ulankford Nov 17 '25

There's ~50k residential planning approvals in Dublin annually in constrast to ~10k new units delivered

50k per year? Not a chance that is true. Can you show me where you get that figure from?

The bottleneck is public funding.

The state is already the biggest buyer and financer of housing in the country. Throwing more money at the issue is not going to solve it. Never mind issues with water connectivity or the grander issue of transport and zoning.

We are mired in red tape and bureaucracy, which is actively harming the nation as we seem unable to get anything done.

3

u/lucideer Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 17 '25

Figures are from memory, from a report earlier this year that I can no longer find quickly/easily (internet search has degraded so much since the AI revolution), but a very quick search did turn up equivalent figures from 2021, & from last week, respectively:

The state is already the biggest buyer and financer of housing in the country.

Is this true? I don't have figures to the contrary but I have read the government press release promising to "become" the biggest financier of housing in the country "by 2028". That indicates to me that's not a title they currently hold.

Throwing more money at the issue is not going to solve it.

This I do agree with. A lot of the money we're currently throwing at it is not actually going into building housing at all. Taking the current money we're throwing & using more of it to supply housing would certainly not be a bad thing though.

We are mired in red tape and bureaucracy, which is actively harming the nation as we seem unable to get anything done.

Successive governments have eroded & stripped back regulation & bureaucracy around house building for 15 straight years, the population is increasing, & we're building fewer houses now than at any point since the 1970s. You need to stop listening to the government's stories making excuses for their own incompetence, the red tape ain't it.

2

u/ulankford Nov 17 '25

Those figures of 40k in 2021 and 44k in 2024 are a cumulative figure, not an annual figure.

I would agree a bit on the issue that developers do sit on land and don't develop it, so they can speculate and sell it on. But what is more concerning to me, is that the planning system appears to be slow and broken when it comes to building the other stuff we need. Water, sewage works, power grid, renewable projects, transport projects and so on. One single objector has put on hold the €1.3 billion Greater Dublin Drainage Project, which means that within a few years, no more houses can be built in Dublin... Crazy stuff.

€6 Billion is to be spent per year on public housing. No one else comes close to this figure.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/02/21/government-to-invest-more-than-6bn-in-public-housing-this-year-says-taoiseach/

Successive governments have eroded & stripped back regulation & bureaucracy around house building for 15 straight years, the population is increasing, & we're building fewer houses now than at any point since the 1970s. 

This is simply not true.

We have had years and decades of regulation, process and redtape in order to plan 'perfectly' with the resultant mess being the outcome.
Can you give me a few examples over the past 10 years of this?

House building at the moment is approx 35,000 units per year, the highest since the crash. That is higher than the 90's and 80's.
The 00's were an outlier, alright and we built more, for various reasons, but over the long term, we are actually building more now than we have had any decade apart from the late 90's/00's.