Speaker 2: 0:44

Tom Phillips Associates, which I set up in 2002 with two colleagues, john and Gavin, and we've run the business since then. I came from a company called Frank Benson and Partners, so I'd been a partner with Frank Benson, who was an excellent planner and unfortunately died quite young in 2001. And in terms of a primary degree, I did an unusual route to being a planning consultant in that I studied art history and English. And the reason I studied art history and English was because I'd actually set off to be a lawyer on foot of my father's pleading. My father was a brilliant man and he really taught because I used to argue quite a bit with him as a teenager. He said to me Tom, you should really be a barrister. My father was in in the grain business, so he wasn't a barrister himself, but he always liked the law and he just tried to encourage me to be a planner or to be a lawyer. And unfortunately, through not studying hard enough in fifth year and hopefully my two twin twin 17 year olds won't be listening to this but I didn't manage to get into law. So I did an art history degree, an English degree, with the view of doing the bar afterwards, but I actually grew to love architecture through doing art history and I had a brilliant professor, alistair Rowan, who encouraged me then to do town planning. So I did town planning after doing the primary degree. I did two years in UCD and then I went to the UK and worked for an architecture company called Terry Farrell, who'd be well known in the modern architecture, worked with him for four years, came back and Frank Benson took me on for two weeks and we became business partners and worked with him for seven years until he died. And then I set up my own practice and we've grown from seven people We've now got 32 people. We've got 16 in Dublin and 16 in Cork. Wow, and that's the practice.

Speaker 2: 2:24

And we would tend to be seen as being very pro-development and we're deliberately so, because I'm passionate about development, I love it and I always tell people it's a planning and development act. It's not a planning act or a development act, it's a planning and development act and the whole purpose of the planning act is to facilitate development. It was interesting with your talk with brendan a few weeks ago, brendan slattery where you're talking about the, the fun fairs the only thing that the planning act says in the preamble that it set out to control its fun fairs, everything else that we provided for houses, roads, schools, etc. It's a provision act, but it's it's been treated as if it's not a provision act.

Speaker 2: 3:00

And the comment about the treacle came from a Scottish architect in 2004 that I remember reading the article in the Irish Times where he left Ireland and he said he was so frustrated being an architect in Ireland, having trained in Scotland, because he said every day was like wading through treacle. I just thought it was a really good analogy and I've used it ever since. And that was years ago, yes, 2004, and now 2025. So it's 21 years ago, a generation ago.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Yeah, and what's? We don't have video. But you brought a very interesting book in here today to show me, which I think is interesting, because if 20 years ago they thought running through Treacle the last episode, we were talking to Brendan Slattery about the length of the planning act and I was making the point that they're kind of proud as as about how long it is, which is sort of a weird perverse thing. But Tom has brought in a book here called a guide to the planning act that was written by Kevin I Nolan, who is the grandfather of Kevin Nolan of Hibernia.

Speaker 2: 4:00

And father of Bill and father of Bill and grandfather of Rod and all the other Nolans, and and father of Bill and father of Bill and grandfather of.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Rod and all the other Nolans. And if you could see this book in front of me, it's about three quarters of an inch thick and it has both the 1963.

Speaker 2: 4:14

1963 and the 1976 Act and an explanation of both of them.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So they're both published in full and an explanation. And this book is. It's not an inch thick, it's.

Speaker 2: 4:24

A5.

Speaker 1: 4:24

It's also an A5.

Speaker 2: 4:25

And it book is, it's not an inch thick, it's A5.

Speaker 1: 4:26

Yeah, it's also an A5. And it's like the decent typeface in it too. So that's where we started. We don't have a copy of the new planning act here because, despite being a construction company, we don't have machinery capable of lifting it. It's so goddamn big. So if that Scottish architect, I wonder what he would think.

Speaker 2: 4:49

He wouldn't be too thrilled. I just did a bit of analysis on this. Actually just the 1963 Act. So the 63 Act came out in. It came out in 1963, obviously in August, but actually it was. It commenced on the 1st of October 1964. So on the 1st of October 1964. So on the 1st of October 2024, it was 60 years old. And in 1963, it had 92 sections In the amendment. In 2000, it had 277 sections and in the 2024 version it has 637. Going from 92 to 637 sections. And that is the Planning Act. And on foot of the Planning Act we'll also have to have the new planning regulations, which are bound to be even more than 900 pages long, and what's really happened in that time, which I think is interesting, right?

Speaker 1: 5:34

So if you leave out the 1960s and 70s, which economically were sort of very bad times here and not that the 80s were particularly good, but things generally started to improve a little bit after that we consistently built more and more houses every year up until 2006, which is the peak of the some would say the madness. But as it happens now all those houses are occupied and then we had the big crash. And then since then we've struggled to get back to housing output numbers of the early 90s. We've struggled to get back to housing output numbers of the early 90s. We've struggled to get back to that when the population was about 50% lower than it is today. So the increase in complexity in the Planning Act seemed to correlate pretty closely with falling output, not just of housing right, of all forms of yeah, it's more, it's more complex, yeah it's more.

Speaker 1: 6:27

It's more complex, but it also seems to be to be coming from a place of stopping rather than from enabling right, like, uh, correct, the complexity is not saying uh, here's all the things we need to consider to get this done. It's here's all the ways that we can stop things if it's not exactly right, like there's another thing that you brought in very kindly, uh, and, and you sent me the digital version of it, which felt smaller because I now have it in hard copy and it's an entire. It's basically a book you've written. Um, it's a presentation, but it's essentially a book about, about invalidation, um, so something that we probably actually haven't discussed, cause we never showed up talking about planning on this podcast, but one of the things we probably haven't discussed is validation. You might just give us a quick Okay.

Speaker 2: 7:11

So there are 31 planning authorities in Ireland. There used to be 86 until about 2014, when the government changed, and I actually made the point one time that if China had the same number of planning authorities as Ireland perorata, then it would have 26,000 planning authorities. So luckily we had 86 and the minister, phil Hogan, changed it to 31.

Speaker 1: 7:32

And they were like city planning and then the counties and cities.

Speaker 2: 7:36

I made a joke one time at a conference because people were complaining about the lack of democracy, about getting rid of some of the planning authorities, and I said, in fairness I felt very guilty about because I promoted, that we needed fewer than 86. And I said the Templemore Town Council had its own planning department and they actually had increased. They'd done 50% more in 2012 than they'd done in 2011. Because in 2011, I think they had processed four planning applications and in 2012 they processed six, so their work data doubled. I'm not going to put 50%, so it's just kind of a jokey thing.

Speaker 1: 8:10

I didn't know this, templemore.

Speaker 2: 8:13

I have been there. This is not when the guards are, yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:16

There's not really anything else there apart from the guard at the college. That had its own planning department.

Speaker 2: 8:21

It had its own planning department, yeah, and own planning department. I had my own planning department, yeah, and it was assessing applications. So now we've got 31. And I did this report not for any client but for myself and because I do think I should have mentioned actually as well. I've been lecturing in UCD since 1993. So I came back from the UK in 1993 and was given a job by my former lecturers to write a report, and then they asked me would I become a lecturer? So now I've been lecturing there since 1993 and was made adjunct associate professor of planning a few years ago, which was amusing Because it starts off doing art history and my lecturer on the first day had said, oh, you'll have difficulty, because no one had done it from art history before, they'd done it from law and from whatever.

Speaker 2: 9:03

But I just had done. I'd learned how to use a scale ruler and how to read drawings. I know every single part of a building through doing art history because we specialize in architectural history. Okay, and alistair owen who's who's still, thank god, is still alive was a brilliant lecturer and he taught us how to use scale rulers, how to look at buildings, how to assess them, etc. And that's how I came to planning as a student, understanding what a building did or what it looked like, and in my two years in ucd I never actually used a scale ruler as a planner. So I now, when I teach now I do eight years, eight days a year, eight to ten. My second or third lecture is how to read drawings. I teach planning students how to read drawings, how to hold a scale ruler, how to work it out, how interpret scale.

Speaker 1: 9:44

It's not well known that a lot of people that work in planning can't read drawings?

Speaker 2: 9:49

Correct, yeah, and it was a problem and it was an acknowledged problem a few years ago when they brought in a number of temporary board members into the Planning Appeals Board. Yeah, that they couldn't, that they didn't come from a background where they were trained how to use yeah, and it trained how to use.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Yeah, it's not their fault, right? I'm not going to go with them. Like it's not an easy thing to read a 2d drawing, like it's something that you have to be shown how to do absolutely and it's a huge important that planners can do that. So um so yeah, the validation, invalidation.

Speaker 2: 10:14

So invalidation came around. I think sometimes I felt because of an inability of either us acting on behalf of developer to to to put forward clear drawings to a local authority or a local authority's ability to read the drawings or something in between. And we had 31 planning authorities. I remember one time down the country talking to a local authority planner and she said oh, that might be what you do up in Dublin, but it's not what we want here. And I said but you've got 31 planning authorities. We've only got one planning act and one planning regulations or one set of planning regulations. We don't have 31 interpretations of what should be in a set of application drawings. So I looked at this and what was shocking was that the average number of applications that are invalidated and I'll explain that in a minute what that means is 15.5%. And what it meant was that in the past you would be delighted if your client got a permission. And then in the 2000 Act they brought out these much more stringent rules about what should be in a plan application and it came about within the first year or two that the local authorities were told that if a drawing and if the documentation that you get is not compliant with the tick box of the regulations that it shall be invalidated. So, in other words, you start again. So, like snakes and ladders, you go back down to zero and you have to start again. You have to do 10 of this or six of that, like a kind of a big version of Noah's Ark. You have to have six of those, six of those, three of those, one of those, the full page of the newspaper, not just part of the newspaper, the full actual page with a red box around the site, notice and all these different things.

Speaker 2: 11:46

And I was looking at it. Some local authorities to me were off the Richter scale in terms of invalidation. So one local authority in particular in the period I looked between 2009 and 2020, had invalidated more than 30% of all planning applications and they received 186 per year, which is less than one per working day, and they invalidated more than 30%. So I would say, why don't they just put somebody at the front desk and their job is this week is to validate all the applications before they come into the system and just go through them and have a tick box and tick them and then, if you got all the tick boxes of all the 31 authorities, they'd be different. So years ago I was down in Limerick. I was looking on the walls of the planning authority and I was thinking to myself that wouldn't get through in Dublin because Dublin would want something slightly different than they want in Limerick, but it's the same regulations.

Speaker 2: 12:34

So I wrote this report in the kind of vain hope that the government might do something. And what I said was and this wasn't just a big complaint, but I said if you had a paid and not an opt-in, that you had to pay either 10 euro for a one-off house or 100 euro for a scheme of this size, or 1,000 euro for a scheme of that size. You pay to the local authority and they validate your scheme over 24 hours and then it's validated. So it's actually validated from the outset. There's no such thing as invalidation.

Speaker 2: 13:03

And I actually also said that on board Panola, who's had a lot of criticism. But on board Panola have a very good system of validation and they have a very low rate of invalidating appeals because they go through it all. And in the SHDs there was a very low rate of invalidations because and there were way more complex applications but they weren't invalidated. So invalidation means that you could be eight weeks in waiting for your decision and suddenly you get a letter from the local authority saying this wasn't a a valid application because you missed out. You only had six. Five drawings of the third floor of the building and you should have had six, yeah, so just to put it, and I worked out how much money the government would have made in that period had they brought it in, and in the millions, and they could have funded the whole planning system by just bringing in this simple idea.

Speaker 1: 13:48

And that's a simple thing for the government in terms of revenue. But there's other costs associated with this, like the delay that, things like that. I had no idea first of all, it was as high as 15%. The delays that are introduced into the entire development cycle by stuff like that are vast. Right, because people think, oh, it's eight weeks. You just stick the application back in, like that's not how that works, right, like you get that invalidation. You go back to your planning consultant, your architect, all the consultants, everyone has to go and get everything, perhaps even print additional things, make sure, pay the application again, send it all back over again, wait a further eight weeks and you could be invalidated a second time. If people wanted to go down that road, instead of having a scenario where they look at it and they go oh yeah, they're missing this, and they just ring up the planning center and go Tom, you idiot, you never sent in the newspaper notice. Would you send it over to me there? Correct, yeah, but that's not what happens there.

Speaker 2: 14:42

Correct, yeah, but that's not what happens, no, and then there's a funny thing that in the guidelines that are brought out they said that there's.

Speaker 2: 14:46

They talk about the concept of de invalidation. So in other words, it said in the rare examples where a local authority might invalidate something, an error, there's no mechanism to re-validate it. And they give an example we did one years ago where we got on the day we were expecting a decision on a quarry application, it came out that the thing had been invalidated. And I rang up the planner, who I knew really well. I said what the bloody hell is this about? And he says, oh, it seems that your client has already started extracting the gravel. And we said he hasn't, he hasn't. And then he said, oh, no, no, they have. And then we said that's the field adjoining it that already has permission the applications for the next field, not the one that your colleague has gone unchecked. And he said, oh, sorry, so we need to start again.

Speaker 2: 15:34

Now the government guideline says that in those rare inverted commas instances where the local authority make a mess and do it, that there should be suitable redress.

Speaker 2: 15:38

And they give the example that they should pay for a new site notice. So I've made the point. And actually the other thing I didn't mention at the start I also do a bit of development from time to time and have done two buildings, and so I have including one during the recession. So I know what it's like to have a bank breathing down the back of your neck, looking for the money, and I think to myself I remember how much money we were paying per month on interest on a vacant site and if I'd lost two months I worked out what it costs us 20 000 euro I would have lost just on a real, and mine wasn't a mega scheme. So if you're doing a scheme that's in the millions and you're set back two months because of some error in a local authority, are you going to say, well, hang on, I'm going to get 456 euro to put an ad in the star next tuesday, so everything's, this is all fine, all right, we'll just move on these things happen, so it's just wrong.

Speaker 2: 16:26

So the system is inherently and I kind of sound like I'm playing to the gallery but it's against developers, it's for the public, because they're always worried about the public. But but the public don't live in houses unless the public, unless the developers build them, and you can't have a system that you've got invalidation. You just can't. Why isn't the't the local authority? If a local authority were to pay €20,000 in a fine, they wouldn't invalidate things incorrectly.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Yeah, that's true, but then I mean the whole idea of, yeah, local authorities and board plan, because I know that's a feature of the new Act, that there would be like fines for not meeting statutory timelines.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:01

I'll tell, public entities are being fined by the government who fund them. So yeah, I know.

Speaker 2: 17:08

And I have to be very careful in this, in this talk, because I don't kind of you don't chriscise City Hall and particularly being a planning consultant, I mean, I have a lot of time for and I defended them on a lot of radio shows and the years.

Speaker 2: 17:20

But one thing that did annoy me was that then chairperson in the Rockets committee back I think in 2023, she was talking about the fact of the so many strategic housing development schemes that had been delayed and so a developer pays 80,000 euro to make an application and then they're delayed in the planning appeals board and the board were obliged to give back 10,000 euro to developers. But a developer x pays 80 000 and he or she gets back 10 000 and the board, the board uh, at the time board chairperson at the time referred to as a windfall gain for developers. So you get me. You you pay 80 000 for a service. You don't get it. You get 10 000 back and that's called a windfall. It's not. It's and it's state money. It's, it's your own money. You're getting back one-eighth of the money that you paid to the system.

Speaker 1: 18:09

I just will add that to the list of absolutely crazy things that have been said in iraq I don't want to criticize them, but that to me is wrong.

Speaker 1: 18:17

No, look in fairness, they do their, they do their best, but like it's just stuff like that annoys me, not because, um, that it matters, right, because it doesn't matter, but, but like it's just stuff like that annoys me, not because that it matters, right, because it doesn't matter, but it's it's again this idea of them and us, like, as you point out, if you need, if people are going to build houses, who's going to? Who's going to build them? Right? We're going to build them, right. So who's going to do the planning? Right? We can't do that. That has to be the planning authorities. Yeah, so that should be symbiosis, right, like we should be working hand in glove to make sure that things are done. But that is not how the system is set up.

Speaker 2: 18:53

It's set up adversarially it's funny because one I've just noticed in my 30 or whatever odd years of lecturing to students and something I want to get to maybe is resources. But I was looking around this year, 42 students have just finished yesterday, on a Sunday, correcting the last of 42 essays for the students, and it's a really multicultural class. There's a complete mix of students and there are students from Ireland, there are students from the, there are students from one Italian, there's a German girl, there are two guys from Pakistan, about six Indians, about six Chinese, three Americans and a Canadian and the rest are Irish out of 42. So it's really multicultural. And one of the reasons I lecture in UCD and I've been very open about this is that I use it to find really good staff members. So my two co-directors that set up the company would be John Gannon and Gavin, and Gavin's the current president of the Planning Institute. Both of those were former students of mine. I just asked them to come work with us but I couldn't employ a big chunk of the class I can't employ, even if they want to come work for me, because they can't get visas to work in Ireland. Yeah, so we're actually employing or educating people at a master's degree level that we can't employ Turf in the mouth Because the critical skills list omits planners.

Speaker 2: 20:12

Yeah, and I was thinking about this whether I should say this or not because I have a friend of mine, ruth, who's a very good podiatrist in Rathmines, and a podiatrist is on the list of critical skills, but planners aren't. And there are excellent planners, like the planner who scored the highest in the master degree program in 2023 is an Indian girl and she's really excellent and they're really good. I mean, I was reading the essays Just really excellent essays but I can't employ them because we can't get them jobs in the country. And we raised this through Gavin, through the Planning Institute, has raised this loads of times and the Department of DETI, as they're called, came back recently and said well, we didn't know there was a need for more planners.

Speaker 2: 20:54

No one told us it was in the paper recently and we got something back from the journalist, sent it to us and said what do you think of this? And they said they didn't know it. So on the critical skills list are podiatrists. Now, last time I checked there wasn't a foot crisis in Ireland. We have a housing crisis and I made the comment at a conference.

Speaker 2: 21:13

Sometimes things come into my head. I made the comment that the state was like a basking shark, going around taking in all the planners, like plankton, and I said we were losing staff members too. I actually remember a lady in the board panel a few years ago said God, tom, you've got great staff. Anybody who's come to the board from your office is great. And I said well, mary, can I? I'd like to hang on to them. Please Don't take my staff, but the LDA and the LDA are really good clients for us. And and the LDA are really good clients for us.

Speaker 2: 21:37

And I was reading John after John Coleman said I didn't mean it wasn't a criticism of the LDA, nor is it a criticism of the OPR or anybody else, but the state has thrown money at the resources of planners, but we don't have enough planners generated.

Speaker 2: 21:51

So there are 42 planners this year in the master's programme, but two years ago there were five. So during the recession there were no planners going through the system, or very few. So it was a missing cohort of planners. And if we could open our doors to Indians, pakistanis, canadians, new Zealanders, all those people, americans and they could come in. So we have a really excellent planner down in our clerk office, gemma, who came from Canada and we took six months to get her into the country and it was like she knows we said that some days we're thinking God, I hope she better be good, because this is a lot of effort, whereas you can be a podiatrist and come into our end on a critical skills list, but you can't be a planner, whereas the list has got town planners, architectural technicians, all of those.

Speaker 2: 22:34

So it gives a heading and town planning is in it, but the actual list excludes town planners. And the ministerial action plan back in October said that town planners will be on the critical skills list and in January or in December the department said well, no one told us, so they're not on the critical skills list.

Speaker 1: 22:51

So there's only a certain number of resources. What's annoying about stuff like that is that's a stroke of a pen, fix right, correct. Two words, two words, and it can happen in 10 minutes, and there's no need for any public consultation or all votes or nothing. The minister can just do that and won't.

Speaker 2: 23:06

The minister said. Well, in fairness to the minister, the minister's action plan has said we will do it, yeah, but like and then the other department says well, no one told us.

Speaker 1: 23:20

We don't know. The thing that really gets my goat about government at the moment, and I think this is a relatively new thing, this kind of finger pointing around the room. Oh yeah, but we didn't say that the minister, one person, can pick up the phone, ring the senior person in the Department of Foreign Affairs and say add that to the critical skills list, do it today. Yeah, and he has that power. Yeah, agreed, and doesn't use it. So I mean, we get onto this a lot and I'm increasingly beginning to lose my patience a bit because I'm hearing again and again and again all these things about solving the housing crisis and how it's imperative.

Speaker 2: 23:56

One thing. That's just that I'm. That, I think, was the right thing to do, and I'm involved with property industry and I'm one of the founding directors. We were at the time of us back in 2011, and we were always coming up with different ways of looking at the system. So Mark Fitzgerald was a founder member, michael O'Flynn, the cork developer, etc. Etc. And Michael and I were talking one day in 2016 about the system and how it could be improved and we were saying that there's an inevitability, that it was just something I'd done, analysis that I'd used for the students. They were saying that 7% of all planning applications go to a Borponola or appeal 7%. So 93% don't Okay, but that's all planning applications.

Speaker 2: 24:39

That's even like a shed or yeah, so, but the department had worked out between 2006 and 2016 that 95% of all schemes of a hundred or more houses or apartments or whatever, went to the planning appeals board. So it went from being 7% to 95. So it was inevitable that they go to the Planning Appeals Board. So we came up and said how could we come up with a system that if it's inevitable, it goes to the Planning Appeals Board? What could happen?

Speaker 2: 25:08

And, in fairness to Simon Coveney, had been appointed as Minister for Housing and he was criticised because he went on his holidays and he had said I will have an action plan for housing the first 100 days of being in office. And remember the paper. The examiner said a minister goes on holidays while he's doing his action plan. But he did. He delivered the action plan in 100 days and part of that was the introduction of this strategic housing development, which was that you apply directly to the planning appeals board as opposed to the local authority.

Speaker 2: 25:38

Now, that is something that, if the most frustrating thing I've found in my career to date has been the reaction to that system, and it is because, well, first of all, there was an article written a few years ago that, as if the Minister was hoodwinked into it. It wasn't. The Minister wrote to everybody and put it publicly out that he wanted people to make submissions on ways in which the planning system could be improved and we put forward through property and the idea that you just apply directly. So I've been involved with Gavin, my co-director, back in the start of the business, with the car up gas field, and everything we did went to the planning appeals board. If they wanted to put a bicycle shed at the back, someone would object to it.

Speaker 1: 26:19

And that's because it was strategic infrastructure. Right, it was on that list.

Speaker 2: 26:22

No, it became, it triggered it. I remember listening to Brandon's thing and other things.

Speaker 2: 26:26

So it was one of the key triggers in 2006, where they introduced strategic housing or infrastructure development, where you apply directly to the Planning Appeals Board. So SHD, which is strategic housing development, is a form of SID. It's the same thing. It's just for housing, as opposed to hospitals or runways. And what really frustrates me about the discourse on it for want of a better phrase is this inference that it somehow was anti-democratic or a bypass to local authority. It didn't, because the local authority is obliged to engage. You couldn't go directly to the Planning and Appeal Department. You, as developer, must go at least once to the local authority and sit down and go through the scheme and get an opinion from the local authority and feedback, and then, at a certain trigger date, you could then go to the board. So you had to go to the local authority. The other thing that's unique about it is it's the only form of development in which local councillors were invited to make comments, so they're not otherwise. There's no right of commentary by a councillor on any form of development other than strategic housing development. And they did.

Speaker 2: 27:29

And the criticism of some of these government initiatives is oh well, they're just paper. But, in fairness, the Action Plan for Housing 2016 said we will introduce fast track planning, as it was called. It was deemed to be fast track, but actually didn't turn out to be fast track. But we will introduce fast track planning, as it was called. It was deemed to be fast track but actually didn't turn out to be fast track, but we will introduce it and he did it. So he did what he said he would do and there's. So there's a lot of good initiatives in these action plans. They just take so long and you can see with the planning act, it's just such a complex document. I mean the amount of senior council and declan brazil, the planning consultant, was involved. There's a lot of people and there's just so much legislation thrown at us and case law and they're trying to plug every gap. It's like a big dyke trying to fill all the holes.

Speaker 1: 28:08

If you're asking everyone's opinion, that's what you're going to end up with. When people say that these things are anti-democratic, they really don't understand what democracy is, because democracy is the triumph of the many over the few. Right, yeah, common good. The common good and what happens actually in the planning system is the triumph of the few over the many, because the common good is build houses. And the way to prevent that is an individual just be one person can hold up housing for a thousand people, for years yeah yeah, for 20 euro, yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:42

So I mean, I actually had this debate with Simon Coveney a number of years ago about something about the Apple data center. So I asked him a question at a conference. I asked did he think it was undemocratic that one person who it turned out was actually a competitor wanted Apple to buy his land for a data center, could hold up something as monumental as that, particularly given where it was going to be? And he kind of I think he kind of knew the answer but couldn't give it publicly, but that was in 2015.

Speaker 2: 29:14

About that, jen, you always have this. It's like one of these things like years ago why can't I do something? Oh, foot and mouth. Why can't I do something? Oh, covid, why can't I do something in planning? Oh, the R-House Convention. And it gets dragged into everything as if, oh well then, oh, better not ask. Yeah, I mean the most democratic planning system in the world. So for 20 euro. And some of the students are bemused because what's more mature, like just older American students, and they're kind of bemused by the fact that in Ireland, that you don't have to live in Ireland to object to an Irish scheme. You could live, they could live in Wyoming or Kansas or whatever and object to something in Ireland and send over 20 euro on their credit card and hold up a scheme or have the right to hold up a scheme, yeah, I mean, and I mean America obviously has.

Speaker 1: 29:57

We won't get into it, but it has its drawbacks. One of the things I thought was interesting this week just what's gone on in California with the fires, that the governor of California said he's going to waive all of planning laws in California to allow people to rebuild their houses with zero red tape. So they're not going to have to, they just have to build a house the same way it was, and so there's going to be no process.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Yeah, we're in Ireland plant, if you're building burns down, your planning mission burns with it, so you're going to start again. Where are we with planning permissions right now? Do you have, do you have any?

Speaker 2: 30:27

well, we, should be building 60 000 units per annum. We're not. We're building around 30 000, okay so we're about halfway down. There's a thing a few months ago for the irish house builders association. I'm looking at all the different range of figures so there was no agreement among state reports as to how many units were built or should be built.

Speaker 1: 30:45

But just to stop you there for a second, there's no agreement on how many units were built. No, no, should be built, okay.

Speaker 2: 30:51

Well, obviously, for were built was kind of a dispute over the ESB figures used to be used. And then people said, well, if you put a shed out the back of your house and put a plug into it, that would be deemed to be a unit. And they've got over that.

Speaker 1: 31:03

So now we know how many units are being built.

Speaker 2: 31:06

Do we?

Speaker 1: 31:06

know how many are getting planning.

Speaker 2: 31:09

We do, yeah, because that's in the. So about 64% of all permissions are residential, across everything. So across everything. So the planning is the housing is the biggest part of all the permissions. And there's the data come out every year and they tell you how many planning permissions and how many are granted, how many are refused, and there's quite a big disparity between certain local authorities as to whether they're the most likely to grant or refuse. So there actually is no consistency across the 31 local authorities. Some have a very high rate of refusal, some local authorities. Some have a very high rate of refusal, some have a very low rate of refusal and some have. I did that part of the analysis. We looked at those which had a high rate of invalidation and did they also have a high rate of refusal, and there was no real correlation. Some had high invalidation, low refusal, others had low invalidation, high refusal, others had a mixture of all kinds.

Speaker 1: 31:54

So it's all over the map.

Speaker 2: 31:56

Yeah, okay, but actually interesting about the SHD, the strategic housing development thing, is that it was like as if you know, sometimes the debate is like as if something's a contagion. For example, the two things that are banned under Irish planning law are one that involves under section 37, involves nuclear fusion or fission, so we can't. The state is precluded from granting permission. That involves nuclear fission, so we can't build. We can't build nuclear power stations and the other and I've heard you talk about it in your build programs before is the dreaded co-living and build to rent the two dreadful things that we could. So nuclear power stations, co-living and build to rent, according to some industry comment.

Speaker 1: 32:40

Well, I wouldn't call them industry commentators. Some people in the media uh, co-living is worse than a nuclear power station.

Speaker 2: 32:46

Yeah, the one just finished, actually in donnybrook. I'm dying to see what it's like when it's open, but I've been to one out in black in dunlaire and I've seen some of the uk and I mean to me that would really anger me but again it's like that's just more of the them and us thing, right?

Speaker 1: 32:58

Like the co-living people are like it's disgraceful, you're building bedsits Like. These are not bedsits, right.

Speaker 2: 33:04

We had five in our office. We had five schemes in gestation in our office. The day that we heard that they were all shut down, yeah, five projects went down the drain. And co-living anybody wants to know what it's like. It's like a slightly older version of student housing. It's people who would be in their 20s or 30s or people moving over to Ireland. Yeah, but it's a better version of what goes on.

Speaker 1: 33:24

anyway, like everybody that I know in college went and rented a house in Rathmines and there was six or eight or sometimes 12 people, even though there might only have been six rooms, and it was great crack and everyone was getting pissed and maybe going to college on the side, and it was great crack and everyone was getting pissed and maybe going to college on the side and it was a great time, right, but they were old houses, they were unsuitable, they were energy inefficient, they were terrible. And co-living is formalising that and saying, okay, you're getting a clean bedroom and your own bathroom, you're going to share a kitchen with your roommates and you can still get pissed and have the crack.

Speaker 2: 34:04

What mates? And you can still get pissed and have the crack, yeah, and it's what's wrong with that? Well, it's, you can't. The last thing you do in a housing crisis is to is to preclude certain forms of tenure. You have to, to me. You have to keep all types available. And the thing with years ago they were banned bedsits and then they came back in by the back door. About two years later it was kind of snuck back in again. You got bedsits again. Yeah, because they realized well, where do all the people in Rathmines who work in whatever, who lived in the 10% of Rathmines were bedsits? Where do they all live? Those are people, all displaced.

Speaker 1: 34:23

Yeah, how are you going to provide very, very low costs for them, Because it's all well and good, like all the high-minded stuff that goes on about? Oh, we need to lower housing costs and I heard some absolutely a cost of anything when it gets involved.

Speaker 2: 34:37

Actually, I haven't thought of it great. Imagine on a half four on a Friday when you've got kind of wet concrete and you need to have it floated or whatever, and you say to a guy well, I need to stay on and finish off that job because it's half four on a Friday, I'm not going to be here, when I hear people talk about that and you know, have to of oxygen to this stuff why are they never asked Give us one example of when the state ever built anything cost-effectively, like what's in history.

Speaker 2: 35:06

I'll tell you a brilliant place and you should go down and see it. Everybody in Ireland should go and look at it. I have to mention my classmates from planning. We've had great. I'm still friendly. We left in 1989 and we still are on WhatsApp and we talk all the time and some of my classmates two of my classmates were former board members. I couldn't talk to them whether they were board members One might be the planning regulator, a very good friend of mine and the others some had been board inspectors and others local authorities and we're all friends, but we all fundamentally well. I would fundamentally disagree with most of them about planning. We're still all great friends, but we go on a trip every year. Around September we went to Ardna, croatia, oh yeah, and it's absolutely fascinating that place. It's the big, it's a water hydroelectric and we were all debating how difficult it would be to get planning permission to build that today.

Speaker 2: 35:52

Yeah, you wouldn't years it was 1929 and they built something like a nine kilometre long canal. They built to create it and you just couldn't get it through now. But it's fantastic and it's done by like there's a brilliant story.

Speaker 1: 36:09

Siemens built it, didn't they? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 36:11

My father-in-law's German. He always says it's not Siemens, it's Siemens. But he always told me about that. But what amazed me about that? Sorry I digress, but they had a warehouse down there that actually has parts that Siemens provided when they built it that have never been used because it was so good and the Irish state I mean the Irish state did a fantastic job with that.

Speaker 1: 36:33

There's one that was a hundred years ago, but we could do it then.

Speaker 2: 36:36

And it's everybody who's involved in the property business or are interested in it should go and look at it. It's an incredible place. Yeah, I've been there a few times. There's a great quote actually from Sean Lamass. When he was open to it he was talking about women. Should be that the. It was just funny. He was saying that a woman, when she's getting married, shouldn't be asking her husband how much road frontage he has. But what's his ability to get a fridge and a freezer and all these electrical? Because it was so unique, it was just it's like something from the dark ages, but it's just funny it was funny, you know on tinder.

Speaker 1: 37:09

You can just ask the guy what his access to appliances.

Speaker 2: 37:15

My, I just thought it was amusing because it just shows you how far we've moved on in one way in terms of that and social norms and what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, but how far we haven't moved on in terms of infrastructure.

Speaker 1: 37:26

But we've gotten a bit like the Romans We've decided that we've won and that now we get to have all of these ideals of perfection. And we, you know we're failing very, very badly at providing basic infrastructure to our citizens.

Speaker 2: 37:45

Well, it was the thing that just struck me as well. I was doing a bit of research a few years ago about this, about Australia. They have a document, infrastructure Australia, and it's come out in February every year and it lists off the top 100 pieces of infrastructure that are required in Australia, in order of preference. Number one is the most important, number two is the second. Number three is this Whereas in Ireland you could say, well, it could be the road between Limerick and Cork, or perhaps it's the airport runway, or it's the children's hospital or whatever it is, but we can't agree.

Speaker 1: 38:14

No, we can't. We can't agree on what the most important thing is. We can't agree on what the most important thing is. We can't agree on how to do it. We can't agree when to do it. We can't agree what it should cost. Like the children's hospital is a great example. That was something that was desperately needed. It was massively under budgeted for and now it's costing what it's costing. But the prevailing wisdom is it's over budget. It's not over budget. It's just that the budget that was created for it was nonsense.

Speaker 2: 38:42

right For a building of that size and scale, or things have moved on, and things have moved on right the known knowns and the unknown unknowns and the Ukrainian war. Look, who's to know that was going to happen? Yeah, and the cost of things.

Speaker 1: 38:51

As for us like concrete cost of putting concrete structures doubled in five years. So, like all of these things, we carry on as though we, with this expectation of perfection, we're not. No one is able to meet those standards, and so then we fall down, and then the finger pointing starts and the blame game starts.

Speaker 2: 39:10

Well, that's the thing about the standards. I was talking to the students just because I find it fascinating because I've got my own children are of similar age. Two of my older daughters are similar age to the students I'd be teaching at UCD and I'm asking them, because they're multicultural and different backgrounds, how many of them of the 42 in the class lived in the student accommodation in UCD? And none of them did so. It was too expensive, all right, because it, like it's really high quality student accommodation. I think some of the standards I mean probably it's this you could, we could talk for an hour and a half and this could be synopsized. Oh, he's looking for a dumbing down of standards. No, I'm not. I'm just saying that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, as Voltaire said, that sometimes you're trying to get the standards are so high that they might as well live in hotels as live in student homes.

Speaker 1: 39:51

Well, Michael Flynn has said this numerous times when he's like you would say, there's only.

Speaker 1: 39:59

Mercedes or BMWs are allowed, right, no one can have a Dacia. Yeah, yeah, because some people can only afford a Dacia. Still gets them around right. And like the idea that we say oh well, no, we want dumbing down standards because the developers want profit. You could very quickly get around that by saying you're allowed, build houses to a slightly lower standard, but price cap them. You know, uh, if it's an a rated house, it's uncapped. If it's a b rated house, it has to be capped at this price and that's indexed right. So so you can say all right, the cost saving that you're going to gain is going to go in the form of cheaper housing. That's easily. That could easily be accomplished.

Speaker 1: 40:36

They do it with the help to buy grant. They cap the price that they help to buy grant. Yeah, uh is for, and you know a lot of these things. When it comes to the energy efficiency measures, there are things that can be upgraded later, like. So if people can get their start and get on the housing ladder, it's okay. Maybe they can't afford an A-rated house in the area that they want to live in, but they can afford a B-rated one. And then you know, five, eight years from now they say, oh, we've made extra money, we can do more insulation, we can put a heat pump in, we can replace the windows, you know. But there's this idea that, no, no, no, the only thing we can build is the absolute best version of it, and if you can't afford that, then the state will pay for it.

Speaker 2: 41:19

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 41:27

Of course the state will pay for it. Yeah, of course the state can't pay for it because there's so much of it needed. So that's the great lie that's being told all the time that the state steps in everywhere and pays for everything. State has limited funds, there's as much, and all those people don't want you to believe that's true. It is true. So then we end up not doing it, and then you have a whole generation of people can't afford to buy a house. They go to australia, they go wherever, and or they stay and endure a terrible quality of life.

Speaker 2: 41:45

Yeah, we had an excellent planner with us a few years ago, aisling, and she went off to London because the landlord wanted their house back and Aisling and all her colleagues in the house, rather than waste time trying to find somewhere in Dublin, just moved to London. Yeah, and another friend of mine, his son and seven of his friends, all went to Melbourne because they just couldn't get accommodation in this country.

Speaker 1: 42:06

Yeah, it's just.

Speaker 2: 42:08

We should be building houses and the other thing I would do. Well, I don't want to be jumping one of your questions, but I ban politicians from objecting to housing.

Speaker 1: 42:16

Yeah, well, that should have happened a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 42:18

You've got councillors who zone land. They're the ones who have the power to zone the land and then they go on behalf of a constituent then object to it. I had one years ago where a politician she had written in in favour of the scheme and opposed the same scheme. She'd written in twice on behalf of two different people, one supporting it and one criticalising it. It was the same scheme. I didn't want to embarrass her but it was just nuts.

Speaker 1: 42:40

Okay, we're just going to turn into a rant, right? So I'm going to throw some acronyms at you, because there is a lot of people that listen to this that aren't actually in our industry and I don't know. They must not have very active social lives to be listening to me droning on, but they do so. They do it to learn, so we're going to try and teach them.

Speaker 2: 42:59

Stz what is that? Okay, strategic development zone. Actually, one of my lecturers in UCD.

Speaker 2: 43:08

I have one called planning is a load of TLA's which is planning is a load of three letter acronyms and the only one that isn't the three letters obviously LRD, because that's a large scale read even though it is three letters, but it's actually four words. So STZ is a strategic development zone. There are 11 of them in the country. The first one was Adamstown, the last one was Knock Airport and it was designated when I think the Taoiseach at the time may have been from Mayo, if I remember rightly. But so there was and there are obviously the ones. Poolbag. We're involved in doing that in Dublin. We're involved down at Docklands.

Speaker 1: 43:41

Are they still? They're not being created anymore.

Speaker 2: 43:44

No, sorry, when the new act kicks in commences, they can't be created anymore. So they can be created now, and we did make a submission on behalf of a major university down in might be in Limerick a few months ago to have the 12th one created.

Speaker 2: 43:58

So an STZ is Okay. I bring it back to this. So in 2000, they introduced this concept of strategic development zone under the 2000 Planning Act and it was designed for the IDA. Because the IDA were frustrated that they had all this foreign direct investment coming in and they just said we can't get permission in Ireland, it takes too long. So they brought in this system that in an STZ it's a plan-led development, so a planning scheme is prepared.

Speaker 2: 44:25

Now first of all the government it's. It's one of the, it's the only example where the government, rather than the local councillors, designate land. So the Taoiseach of the day, responding to his or her minister for the environment, designates land that is deemed to be of strategic, national or social importance to the state. And it works out to be 1,659 hectares of Ireland. So it's a very small part. It's 0.02% of the state is an SDZ and the other 99.98% isn't an SDZ, so that's deemed by councillors. So these are really the kind of the primus among the first among equal. These are the key bits of land that in the country are designated by the state to deliver of development of economic or social importance. And after, in the machinations of the 2000 Act, they actually, at the last minute, added in residential, and the bizarre thing is that most of the schemes to date have been residential.

Speaker 2: 45:28

And I did a report back in 2021 when I was being frustrated by the criticism that strategic housing development was getting In. That I looked at, I tried to make a comparison of SHD and SDZ, so strategic housing development versus strategic development zones, because one was deemed to be developer-led planning and the SHDs were deemed to be plan-led development, which I've always found is a very annoying argument, because it isn't so simple that if a developer puts it forward it's bad, if the SAVE puts it forward, it's good. It's not that simple an argument. So the SDZs. So back in 2006, or sorry, 2021 or 2, we worked out of the 11 SDZs, six of them hadn't actually commenced. So there's one Clon Magaddon outside Meath. Nothing had happened.

Speaker 1: 46:10

Other is Monarch Magaddon. I know the well-known.

Speaker 2: 46:13

It's outside Navan.

Speaker 1: 46:16

And there's an SDZ.

Speaker 2: 46:17

An SDZ. You know, the Minister for the environment may have been from me at the time. There's actually a very strong correlation between the ministers. Who the minister's from, but they were designated anyway, that's just a coincidence.

Speaker 1: 46:26

These things are written down in legislation rather than Well, they're designated by the government, yeah, and then the so of the 11, 10.

Speaker 2: 46:38

Sorry, a development agency has to bring forward a scheme called a planning scheme that is then set in stone. That is basically the scheme. So they do the whole design. Yeah, that's a development agency, but the development agency in 10 of the 11 cases is the local authority. So in grange, gorman is the only example where it had its own bespoke development agency, independent of the local authority.

Speaker 2: 46:58

Okay, and um, they, that's that was to do do the university and the healthcare. So those are areas. And then the other ones would be Cherrywood. So you've had on your podcast before Brian Moore, so Brian would be the major developer out in Cherrywood. You've got Johnny Ronan in Pool Beg with Lioncore, you've got the one in the Grand Canal docks in Dublin and the North Lots, johnny and others, and the Central Bank and the Convention Centre. All those are in it. That area is being done out. Then there's Hansfield, there's Monard in Cork, there is the North Quays in Waterford. There is so mainly around the Dublin area and Meath and the major cities, and then obviously over in Knock as well.

Speaker 2: 47:49

Okay, so that's SDZs, right, strategic Development Zones, and those have planning schemes and planning schemes live beyond the life of a development plan and as long as you build within accordance with your planning scheme, there's no appeal mechanism. So once on board Panola and usually is on board Panola in the case of, I think, waterford and Knock is a local authority there's no appeals. So people can write in an appeal about the planning scheme, but once the board approves it, that's it and the developer gets permission and there's no appeal mechanism and there's no provision for judicial review. There is, but there hasn't been. Well, there was in the bizarre one.

Speaker 2: 48:25

The judicial review in Docklands was a bizarre one because the Minister, owen Murphy, in December 2018, told all the local authorities to go away and revise their planning schemes to have greater height, and Dublin City Council did a review. The board took about a year and a half to no three years actually to determine it and they came back and refused. So Borponola refused Dublin City Council's amendments. He said they were too low, they hadn't gone far enough, and Dublin City Council judicially reviewed the board. That's right.

Speaker 2: 48:55

So I think the minister was not hugely impressed by having one entity of the state judicially reviewing another entity of the state.

Speaker 1: 49:02

Yeah, it was a bit.

Speaker 2: 49:02

Yeah, so that's been, but there have been very few and they tend to be successful in the sense that they they give some certainty to developers, but the problem is the IDA has never used it. So the IDA has never been a proponent of, or never like it was built for them, but they've never used it. They never used it. Okay, and because it's sometimes a bit tricky, because you're sometimes you're crystal ball gazing what some FDI might want in three years' time, and it shall be this metres by that metre by that metre.

Speaker 1: 49:28

Yeah, and then you can't change it right?

Speaker 2: 49:30

Or you can change it with extreme difficulty. It's really difficult to change it Right, okay, all right.

Speaker 1: 49:34

So that's STZs, shds we've talked about Strategic Housing, development, housing development.

Speaker 2: 49:39

Yeah, which is a form of SID, which is strategic infrastructure development. Right, it just means that you apply ultimately to the Planning Appeals Board and not to the local authority.

Speaker 1: 49:47

Yeah, because it's going there anyway, so you might as well skip a step right, but you go via the local authority, you talk to the local authority and you get all their opinions on it. Okay, so we won't delve residential development is the replacement of SHD, okay why is it different?

Speaker 2: 50:03

it's okay because, apart from it's, three letters.

Speaker 1: 50:05

Yeah, it should be four letters.

Speaker 2: 50:07

I'm a bit of a pedant about that, but it's different because, well, it's the same as the conventional system. To me, it's not much different than a conventional planification because in an SHD you go negotiate with, they're no longer allowed, although there are 27 of them still sitting in a Borpilola waiting to be determined, which is another story Actually 28.

Speaker 1: 50:28

Oh, it's 28, is it? It was 27,. But we had one that was judicially reviewed and was quashed. And last week or two weeks ago, we got a letter, and this is three years ago. We got a letter, and this is three years ago. We got a letter from board plan all saying that the high court has remitted the permission back to them and they're deciding it again now. Okay, yeah, so three years later they're starting.

Speaker 2: 50:49

So we have another shd that we thought was dead, that is I mean I'm sure lazarus has come back to it.

Speaker 1: 50:54

Well, lazarus continued to live for a little while. I'm not so confident about this, but anyway, sorry for interrupting no, so, um.

Speaker 2: 51:01

So we're just talking there about the.

Speaker 1: 51:04

About the LRD. The LRD, they're conventional planning permissions, really.

Speaker 2: 51:07

So the SHD was brought out in 2006, mooted in 2016, came out in 2017, and it had a defined life. So you often see media reports about the abandoned SHD and the dreadful system. And it was dumped and abandoned and was in the programme for know the dreadful system. And it was dumped and abandoned and was in the program for government to get rid of it, but it was actually always in the legislation that it had a defined life.

Speaker 2: 51:30

It was never designed to be there forever. It was there for a short period of time and actually was extended once by the government, as was allowed under legislation. So it was brought out for a defined period and then they deemed it to be a success. Success because my point I'd made is that SHD, which is the dreaded developer-led planning, had delivered way more residential units than the SDZs. So the SDZs had worked out, in the 20 years between 2001 and 2021, had actually granted 6,000 residential units, even though it was held up as this fantastic system in terms of houses, whereas the SHD, in three years, had delivered a multiple of it.

Speaker 1: 52:05

It's as though that there was incentives.

Speaker 2: 52:07

Yeah, so the LRD was brought in as a means of. So it is a hundred or more residential units or 200 or more bed spaces in student accommodation, which is the same as the SHD, but you can have up to 30% extra floor space which is commercial, whereas an SHD was 15% Right. So the SHD scheme.

Speaker 2: 52:30

So you couldn't do mixed use development with SHD we were doing one or two and we were literally kind of Jesuitical arguments about how can we make it well, it's 14.9%, or it's 14.9% or 5%, and you couldn't risk having an extra square metre, because then the thing wouldn't be SHD Right.

Speaker 1: 52:46

So an LRD. It was very inflexible. Actually, it was very inflexible from that point of view.

Speaker 2: 52:50

So the LRD, thankfully, has got a 30%, so it can have up to 30% of other uses. So it should be commercial or retail, whatever it is, and you've got the housing is 100 units or 200 bed spaces, right, and you apply in the past in the SHD, in the normal system you apply to your local authority, one of the 31. And in SHD you apply to the board, having spoken to the local authority.

Speaker 1: 53:18

but in LRD you apply now to the council again, yeah, and then you're open to appeal and there's a statutory process that you go through for timelines, right, there's a stage one, stage two, stage three we're doing one at the moment it's the only reason I know this and it's like Byzantine dates and you have to have this report and it's actually the stage two or three, I can't remember.

Speaker 2: 53:40

Well, it's good because everybody knows the rules. That's the good thing about it. Everybody knows the rules, which is good, right and also the thing that was really good about SHD is the first time ever that the local authority was obliged to bring all the people to the meeting. Because in the past you go in for a development.

Speaker 1: 53:52

It could be a major development and you meet the planners and they didn't come to the meeting.

Speaker 2: 53:59

And now, with these big schemes, they have to bring all the people to the table.

Speaker 1: 54:03

So, you've got someone from roads ecology and they all sit around the table and they can all give their opinions and, in fairness, I have noticed that they've gotten much better at that Now that things are all done on teams and they all show up which is a big improvement.

Speaker 2: 54:18

Well, it's helpful, because then you can see, and then you ask them to engage as well because you want someone not to keep. You want anybody quiet at the meeting. If there's something to be said, say it.

Speaker 2: 54:28

Yeah, say it then so we can change it right and not end up right. And then the other thing about LRD, the large-scale residential development is that there's very limited opportunity to ask for further information. They can't ask, whereas in a normal application there's almost a default. It says under legislation that a local authority. So you lodge an application and say, just take a conventional planning application. You lodge an application and in the first five weeks members of the public can pay €20 to make what they call submissions or observations, which 99 times out of 100 are opposed to the scheme. But sometimes you get people writing in and saying they support it. I send the odd letter support in.

Speaker 2: 55:01

Actually I did an oral hearing years ago where I was acting for all the people who were for the scheme and I was driving all the third parties at the oral hearing mad because they kept saying we're all opposed to it. I'd say, sorry, we're not. Yeah, every five minutes later sorry, we're not.

Speaker 1: 55:15

Sorry, we're not. There's a group Build Homes. We're trying to actually get them on the podcast and they coordinate people to write letters of support for development.

Speaker 2: 55:26

It's a group of young people that started this thing Who'd like to live somewhere?

Speaker 1: 55:29

you mean, who'd like to live somewhere? Yeah, yeah. The YIMBYs right and we spoke to in season one Brian, a guy from California. Oh, the YIMBYs, the YIMBYs, yeah, one, so they're actually they're a bit more serious, like they have a lot of staff, a lot of funding to try and drive stuff on, whereas this is like an activist-led thing in the UK and like they're amazing, they're going around, they're going to council meetings, they're speaking up, they're showing like they're doing. They can be really actually quite powerful.

Speaker 2: 56:02

We'd won one about two years ago. It was one Saturday. We've a WhatsApp of where I live and we've an SHD scheme quite close and one of my neighbours was saying, oh, isn't it fantastic that it's been judicially reviewed? And I was sitting there saying, well, I could say nothing, I could get on with my life because it is Saturday, or I could say what I really think. So I said what I really think. So I said what I really thought, and it led to hours of back and forward, back and forward, and most of the people were opposed to what I was saying. I was saying, well, we shouldn't have it. We're like the place is big enough in Milltown, that's big enough. And I said, no, it's not, it keeps growing. And I used the analogy. I got the.

Speaker 2: 56:35

There's a book written in 1837 by Lawrence, where he went around um around Ireland and he wrote about places and he quoted his description of Milltown in Dublin and said you wouldn't recognise it because the place changed. And then there's a photo. A really good book came out about Milltown and showed something in 1953, an aerial photograph. It's fascinating, but people are struggling Where's that building? That wasn't there. And things are built all the time and people seem to think that places are static, but they don't. They evolve all the time.

Speaker 1: 57:03

Yeah well, when you are at the centre of your own universe, you do believe that everything else is moving around you.

Speaker 2: 57:08

So the state we live in was built in 1936 and before that was the back garden of a big house. Yeah, and all these places are, if you look around, of Clonsky Castle. But now it's housing. So you need to build houses. We need, as I often said, it's either Ashburn or Melbourne. So we either build houses for our children in Ireland or they're going to disappear.

Speaker 1: 57:27

Yeah, too right, I have one more. I have two more acronyms, okay.

Speaker 2: 57:37

Wait, maybe I have three. No, okay, it's two. Udz, okay, udzs. So UDZs are urban development zones, so the SDZs, of which there are 11, they can't create any more, they've reached. That would be sorry, unless the minister brings one in now, before the new planning act comes in. But in the new planning act you'll have urban development zones and urban development zones would be they'd be things called candidate urban development zones, where at the moment the SDZs are for development of economic or social importance to the state and the UDZs will be for economic, social or environmental importance to the state and it will be areas that a local authority will be requested by the minister for all, 31 local authorities will be sent off to look for candidates as UDZs. So, as I said, at the moment we've 13, we've 31 local authorities, we've got 13 SDZs so, and Dublin's got the lion's share of them. So there's lots of counties in Ireland that don't have, like Limerick or Leitrim doesn't have a UDZ doesn't have an SDZ, so these the government will send off.

Speaker 2: 58:45

the minister will tell local authorities to go away and provide these, identify sites that could be candidate urban development zones, and then it will go. Eventually the development plan will have to be changed to allow and the development plans will have 10 year lives. So they'll have to be identified in a development plan that this area has been picked as a candidate urban development zone. There's a framework prepared for it by the local authority and then it's like an SDZ. It goes to the planning appeals board and a planning scheme is put in place for it. So there might be more of them they're just smaller versions of SDZs but there might be more of them and then the local authorities are supposed to be the development agencies. So the local authorities are to prepare these planning schemes.

Speaker 2: 59:24

And in the government document a few years ago about local area plans they said that developers can't put forward local area plans. So in the past a developer said I know you guys are really busy We'll do one for you, we'll give it to you, you can have it democratically assessed by your councillors and we'll bring it forward as a scheme. And it was written in that developers couldn't do it. But who can do it? Children. The guidelines on local area plans say that they must take on board the views of children. So I jokingly said to my children a few years ago any chance one of you would send this in for me, because I'm acting for this developer. He owns the land. He's not automatically you're not automatically obliged to talk to the landowner, but you are obliged under legislation to talk to children. So if you were to send in the document and sign it, victoria, who's now in her mid-20s and sign at age six, it'll have to be taken on board. It's just you couldn't make it up jesus christ, um, okay, um, all right.

Speaker 2: 1:00:18

Last one lap local area plans like mini development plans so they're done for an area like Goatstown in Dublin or some part of Cork or some part of Limerick. There's a local area plan prepared by a local authority and it's not adopted by the. It's adopted by the local authority and it sets out kind of a framework for development of the area. And it might be it's given its power by the development plan. So for example, at Goldstown they wanted a civic square and buildings should be this, that and the other height. But it's it's appealable.

Speaker 1: 1:00:48

Right.

Speaker 2: 1:00:49

And it's. It's a kind of a. It gives a. It's a framework for developers to understand what they can and can't build.

Speaker 1: 1:00:54

Right, so instead of like to be zoned for residential, and it's maybe X number of hectares, but that's it, it's just residential, and then after that we'll figure it out.

Speaker 2: 1:01:04

You might have to read your housing mix or something like that, but it doesn't say we need a civic square there.

Speaker 1: 1:01:10

Yeah, it doesn't dictate right. They dictate that, but the LAP dictates.

Speaker 2: 1:01:13

It says there should be a school there and should be civic plaza there and there should be buildings here, and the mix of uses should be this, or it's kind of relatively prescriptive.

Speaker 1: 1:01:21

Yeah, so like it's a good idea.

Speaker 2: 1:01:23

In theory, yeah, if it's well written. If it's well written and if it's enforced.

Speaker 1: 1:01:27

One thing that I've read about recently with the LAPs is when they expire because they are, for they're separate. They're in the development plan, but they're separate, right.

Speaker 2: 1:01:38

And there are 350 in the country.

Speaker 1: 1:01:41

Right, yeah, but they, but they can expire separate to the development plan.

Speaker 2: 1:01:44

They can. They have a different life. They have a different life right.

Speaker 1: 1:01:46

So what happens when a piece of land has an LAP on it and the LAP has expired?

Speaker 2: 1:01:52

A local authority or the board could say we can't grant you permission because you're non-compliant with the LAP that has expired. Yeah, and it's a mess. And the new Act has a piece in it that says that they can extend extant living LAPs, but it's silent on what happens to the dead LAPs and local authorities at the moment. There was a letter the other day from one of the major local authorities saying we can't deal with your proposed variation because we're gearing up to write our tenure plan, having just, in 2022, written our six year development plan, which we've got to gear up to write our tenure development plans.

Speaker 2: 1:02:29

Dublin City Council, which is a really good local authority, does loads of work, is under-resourced, it doesn't have the people, it doesn't have the bodies and then the people are moving around. So you might have like the cultural shift. And I was talking to a planner there a few weeks ago who's a very senior planner at Dublin City Council and he had been in another Dublin City local authority for three years and he said when he left there was no planner in his department who'd been there when he joined and they've all left since because they're moving around all the time.

Speaker 1: 1:02:54

That's a problem in itself.

Speaker 2: 1:02:56

It's a problem in all forms of work now, but particularly local authority, where you've got an innate knowledge of a part of the city or whatever, and then you lose it or someone else comes in. They don't understand it. I don't know how you thought.

Speaker 1: 1:03:07

well, resolve it by resources, Give them more resources, yeah, and by giving them good working conditions and allowing them to make positive contributions. Like I don't think that planners would enjoy the way the system is set up either, this adversarial saying no, they're not going to enjoy that. That's not why anyone went to study planning to say no, right, that's not how it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:32

Nor is it the Planning Act? Because the Planning Act actually is. I always tell at the very first lecture I give to UCD students. I get them to work out what is the name of the Planning Act and I put in some funny versions of it. It's the planning and development document and it says an act to provide for housing. Dot, dot, dot, dot dot. So it's all full of positive verbs but there's only three mentions the 2000 Act. There's only three mentions of developers and they're all negative. And if you look through your 920 pages of the current Act, you won't find the word viability anywhere in it. It's just it doesn't appear.

Speaker 1: 1:03:59

So so that's. I mean. Look, that's another podcast in itself. It's a whole other series. Um, I have down here to ask you about like what's the most? I mean I use the word ridiculous, but like what's the, the planning case that sticks in your mind the most, the most frustrating or most discouraging planning case that you it?

Speaker 2: 1:04:16

just says to me that I was thinking how many, how many hours have we got?

Speaker 1: 1:04:19

yeah, well, I, you've got to pick one though right.

Speaker 2: 1:04:21

Well, I think the treatment of SHD would be is outstanding to me. It rankles me because I was. There was an article written by two academics in UCD and I'm on the staff of UCD technically and I helped one of them write an article because he wanted me to explain the SHD and I spoke as openly as I'm speaking here now, but he put that probably more openly because I thought and he went and quoted me in it but didn't say who it was. It was thinly disguised. It was me, clearly me, and it made it look as if we tried to hoodwink a minister into coming up with this newfangled system, which wasn't the case, because the minister had put out in writing asking people to make submissions, it and that that sticks in my craw, and also the fact that newspapers were writing within six months. Where are all these great shds?

Speaker 2: 1:05:06

we all want to figure out and the thing I made the point there's a very good uh planning practice in the uk called litchfields and they write really, really good uh research pieces and one of them was about they'd done one about how the translation rate from permissions to housing and they do it after five years and they said there was a 50% for large schemes. It was a 50% translation rate of permissions into large scale housing schemes after five years. Within less than a year after SHD came out, certain newspaper articles were saying where are all these houses? As if it was Angel Delight with a big thing of water and a massive wooden spoon and suddenly all these houses are going to come out of it. So that to me is frustrating. Then I had one recently around the ambassador theatre where we refused permission to put railings around the ambassador theatre and it was refused and that. So that's because it was a protected and we're not in the public realm, but you can't protect it. You can't protect it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:58

The people who kind of who sleep and do whatever they do beside billings when they need to go and there's no toilet nearby, and that I mean that is a small example. So we do everything in the office, from big to large schemes, small schemes, and that one it just stuck. It was a recent one, stuck in my craw, and also the other one, actually I'm looking at the window here down at Mount Crescent and saw a ones where Brent geese come out, yeah, and we've had a few of those and there's one.

Speaker 1: 1:06:22

actually Were you involved in the one up in St Anne's.

Speaker 2: 1:06:25

Yeah, we have been involved with that, and also one in Kulak where they had done the developer had done analyses showing there was no Brent goose. It did four years of bird surveys, yeah, and the board wasn't convinced. I mean, I love planning, I love my job, absolutely love it, but I find it frustrating and I'm always trying to make it better as everybody is Like no one's in it to make it worse.

Speaker 1: 1:06:45

Well, some people are in it to make it worse, tom, okay, okay, but you can draw no other conclusion. The Planning Act is a missed opportunity for reform, and there's no other way of looking at it. Apart from that, there is a cohort of people that do not want things to change yes, I'm a friend of mine, actually, paul.

Speaker 2: 1:07:05

He lives in the states I was talking about recently over christmas and he was saying about I'd never come across this concept for the overton window. I don't ever come across it, yeah, in political discourse. Yeah, I just thought it'd be a really good thing to apply to the irish planning system about housing, because it's basically saying that you take things that are acceptable, things that are kind of slightly odd, and then things that have to be unthinkable. And if you were saying, well, if we were to apply the theory of the planning system and, even for a short period, to do things that might be unthinkable, if we could build houses really quickly, that wouldn't be good news for planning consultants because we'd be out of a job. But Ireland needs houses.

Speaker 2: 1:07:41

But, these are all solvable problems. If Australia can job, but ireland needs houses, it's just. But these are all solvable problems. If australia can do it with a 20 million population, why can't we do it? And I want to get something else that I probably okay. One of the questions you do ask what really frustrates as well, my planie. The one thing that really gets on my goat in 2012, the government announced this and you think about it is how many of the world's leading tech companies are in our end? Yeah, okay, and we have a system with 31 planning authorities that until recently, they had four different computer systems. Yeah, so the 31 local authorities couldn't talk to each other and they couldn't talk to import panola because their computer system wasn't linked. Yeah, and my planie was raised by the minister in 2012, april 2012, and she said at the time that this is a very simple concept where you'd have a website that would show all the development plans stuck together physically on a map.

Speaker 2: 1:08:39

Now if you look at it today, most of the country is blank and it says awaiting data because the local authorities haven't given the documents. So Dublin City Council is on it and a lot of the Dublin's are on it, but most of the country it's blank. And if you look and you click on it and say why can't I find out what that field is owned without having to look at the Leit is awaiting data, like how long do you wait? It's not hard to do. Another one, actually a funny one in local authority about two years ago, was actually quite a funny story.

Speaker 2: 1:09:07

A planner was on a Zoom call and the planner started giving out to me and said well, tom, it would, and there's about six or seven people, including the client, on the call. I said well, tom, what would have helped if you sent in the drawings at the correct scale? And and she said yes, but I'm working from home. And I said what's your point? He said I'm working off a computer. I said but the drawings are physically in your office at the correct scale. And I had to explain to her that the fact you're looking at a computer it's like father ted series, like near and far away. I said, the fact you're looking off your computer doesn't mean that the physical drawings in your office, should you decide to go in there, are at the correct scale you probably don't get get that Father Ted reference, do you, did you?

Speaker 1: 1:09:43

It was a weird thing in Canada you didn't really have Catholic priests.

Speaker 2: 1:09:48

So you were from Canada because just as well, they said how good Canadian planners were. She's a critical skill, no a general.

Speaker 1: 1:09:55

Are you a general skill?

Speaker 2: 1:09:56

So it took. You see, we got a planner in there, canadian planners in through the general list, but it took six months and a lot of hoo-ha you had to move to portugal. I had to leave the country in the middle of covid and it took about five months for mine as well.

Speaker 1: 1:10:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, she was complaining about it, but she was in lisbon beachside apartment okay, well, you know her, her team's thing was set to away a lot of the time. Yeah, we're dead right. So I think she was having a pretty good time still getting paid. Oh no, you weren't getting paid actually, because we couldn't employ you. Yeah, no, okay. So I feel I feel a little bit more sorry for you now. All right, um, tom, I've used up way too much of your time here, um, but I have other things. Magic wand, what's your?

Speaker 2: 1:10:42

might well that one was the one I said the my planie that we actually here's, that's your magic. No, no, no. It sounds like such a simple thing we don't have, I'm sorry, with a wish, isn't it kind of wish, it's?

Speaker 1: 1:10:51

a wish? Yeah, I wish. Well, it's not a wish, it's like. You can do it. You have the power.

Speaker 2: 1:10:55

We have a power. Okay, my power is I'm going to. Well, honestly, I'd actually love to administer for housing, okay that's the first person who said that, actually interestingly.

Speaker 2: 1:11:03

This is going to be thrown back at me because I believe that Dara O'Brien has the first name, but actually you could be made a senator. The Constitution allows two people to be made a senator and then you can be the minister. And that would probably drive half of the anti-development world mad if I became minister, but I would actually, in an ideal world, I'd love to administer housing because I'd have cranes on the skyline within weeks. Are we building houses? Because we need to build houses. So it's to, it's to put in place some form of mechanism to allow houses to be built and get permission in a much more and much more collegiate way, that the local authorities are not adversarial, that they're working with developers to make it happen.

Speaker 2: 1:11:40

But my very simple task would be all these high-tech companies in Ireland and yet there's no map. You can click it on and say this is all zoned map land in Ireland and this is the layer of all the service land and these are all the layers of the bus routes and the train routes, et cetera. So it's have myplanie doctored and I wouldn't say it'd take more than a week to get that up and running. And such a simple thing. And stop saying awaiting data. I tell you what. Pick up the phone, ring the guy in Leitrim and say send me on that.

Speaker 1: 1:12:11

GIS. Yeah, just give it to me.

Speaker 2: 1:12:13

I need it one week. And then the minister brings them all in, all the 31 chief executives, and said why haven't you done it? Well, dublin City Council's done it, another place has done it. Why haven't you done it? And if there's some impediment and I'm the minister there's an impediment called Joe or Jane in my department who's stopping from doing it. I want them in my office after lunch and I want to know what they're going to do.

Speaker 1: 1:12:33

That's a simple task.

Speaker 2: 1:12:35

So you kind of have a two there because you're like you want to be. That was just a joke, I know, and leave the minister out because I've never put myself forward. Because the headline is going to be Tom.

Speaker 1: 1:12:46

Phillips, back up by the army?

Speaker 2: 1:12:47

No, no, it's not no it's not Because, I mean, these people put themselves forward. God knows why. It's masochistic to be democratically elected, so it has to be democratic. But I think in times of crisis, you need to do certain things, and that could be the over to window where you do something that's technically unthinkable. We did it, covid.

Speaker 1: 1:13:04

We did it. We turned around and we're like yep, emergency, we're doing this, you don't like it?

Speaker 2: 1:13:09

I'd like the headline to be the master or the myplanie.

Speaker 1: 1:13:13

I think that's just a simple solution. Book recommendation.

Speaker 2: 1:13:17

Yeah, simple one. It's a book by a guy called Simon Sinek S-I-N-E-K. And I came across him on TED Talks years ago. Oh okay, it's a book called Start With why, and he started off. He says that in any good company should not start saying how they do things or why they do or what they do, but should say why they do it. And every time I write, when I do my all my lectures, I always start off. I write everything in threes and I say why I'm, why I'm giving that lecture, how I'm going to tell them about it and what I need them to know. And when I write reports, I do the same thing. Just simple thing. It's the golden circle of why, how and what, in that order.

Speaker 1: 1:13:52

And that's what Apple do.

Speaker 2: 1:13:53

What other places do, and I use the analogy of the in that thing, about the invalidation, about the um, about the. You know why you'd want to write a book about invalidation as opposed to saying there's 15.5% of all planning applications are invalidated, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. So the first reason to set up why you do it, why you'd write the thing, is to highlight something that can be solved, that can be fixed, to make it perfect from the start, as opposed to have inherent flaws in the system. And there's so many things in planning that we could do that. We could do that, we could make it proper from the start, and then it would work accordingly.

Speaker 1: 1:14:28

What was the quote that you had Design it from the?

Speaker 2: 1:14:31

It was a great thing in Simon's book About. A Japanese automotive engineer Was sent to Went to America to see how an automated line worked In terms of the factory in an American car plant and he was looking at it and then at the very end of the production line, this guy came out with a rubber mallet and started tapping the doors and standing back a bit like a snooker player and looking at the car, checking the line along the side of the car, then tapping it with this rubber mallet. And the Americans were very proud of this and they turned to the Japanese guy and said what do you think? And he said what's that man doing? And they said he's just making sure it's perfect. And the Japanese guy said well, why doesn't he make it perfect? Why don't you design the car to be perfect from the start? Why do you need somebody with a rubber mallet to come along and fix it?

Speaker 2: 1:15:14

And I use that analogy to get across the point about the planning system. Why don? Why don't you? If you know something's wrong, if you know invalidation is part of the system, why do you accept it? Why don't you have zero tolerance for validation and put in place a simple thing that you can't lodge an application unless you've had it validated by the local authority. And then you could even put things like put a barcode on a site notice that someone could could look it up and they could see what the scheme was, or whatever it is. If that makes the public complain more, so be it, but at least you've got the system there that people know will work and that if a site notice is up on the site it means there is a valid application behind it so I think I could sum up it by saying design it better yeah, design it better.

Speaker 2: 1:15:54

Like it's a. It's a planning and development act and we need we have a housing crisis, one of the things we can't. Even the state brought brought out back in 2024, four different documents, including the Housing Commission, which is just, it's a actually. That's another thing. I'm going to say to you a quick of the 83 recommendations, and it said that of the 83, 65 were either implemented underway or partially underway. And if you think about it, I was just thinking the other day about an analogy Supposing your wife went out and said you know that the fridge door is loose?

Speaker 2: 1:16:38

Yeah, and you go, yeah, and she goes off, and she comes back a few hours later and says what have you done? And you said, well, it's either in terms of fixing it, it's either implemented, it's underway, or it's partially underway. And she goes, knowing me, she'd say it was partially underway. So what have you done? I said, well, I went down to Woody's and I bought a screwdriver, yeah, so therefore it's partially underway. So forget about it. Now look of the 83, really, how many of them actually have you actually are done? Yeah, well, like, what does partially underway mean? Like it's great, isn't it? I must do that in future, like if you tend to a kid that goes into school and hasn't done the homework, and the kid said and the teacher says well, have you done it? Well, it have my pens and my paper here.

Speaker 1: 1:17:21

So anyway, we could keep on for hours. Yeah, we could. Tom Phillips, thanks so much for coming in. I can't believe. I mean, I feel like we've been here for 10 minutes, but we've been here for an hour and a half and there's a lot of stuff on the list that I think maybe we might get you to come back after the Planning Act has been commenced, when I'm Minister for Housing. Is it when you're Minister?

Speaker 2: 1:17:42

for Housing. Is it when you're Minister for Housing? Well now, you've agreed to the interview now, once you're appointed Minister.

Speaker 1: 1:17:48

Thanks so much for coming in and for all that. There's a lot in there and I think that for people who aren't in the industry, who are interested in planning, there's a lot of information actually that you guys have published which is written in very clear eyed uh manner and I think lay people could understand it. Um. So, thank you for doing that, for your contribution to the industry, Um, and I, uh, I really, really appreciate it. I've learned things today. I can't say I feel that much more hopeful unless your coup comes off. Then I feel very hopeful. So thanks a lot for coming in, Thank you. Thank you, Deidre. The build is produced by Carrie Fernandez and me, Rick Larkin. Music is by Cass.