Wicklow Sinn Féin TD John Brady has argued that the Wicklow County Council Planning Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) has serious questions to answer, following revelations that the Planning SPC failed to perform its core statutory function of ensuring that local area plans are up to date. Its failure to do so has led to planning for hundreds of homes across Wicklow being turned down by An Bord Pleanála (ABP).
This includes 329 homes in Blessington, a further 352 homes in Rathnew, and with further questions being raised in the Arklow area.
Brady said:
“The Planning SPC has a collective responsibility under its chairperson, Fine Gael Cllr. Edward Timmins to ensure that local area plans are kept up to date.
Timmins who is the current chair, along with his colleague FG Cllr. Sylvester Bourke shared the role of chair of SPC over the last five years which made up the tenure of the last Council.
Their failure to ensure that the Planning SPC carried out its statutory obligation has resulted in planning applications being turned down at different sites across the County.
In Blessington, planning for 329 homes was refused as the local area plan was out of date resulting in a situation where there is no statutory zoning in place.
The same situation arose in Rathnew, where 352 homes were refused planning permission for the same reasons.
In both instances local area plans were allowed to lapse in 2019. A full five years ago. This cannot be passed off as an oversight or some obscure admin difficulty.
They had five full years to fulfil their role, which includes ensuring that the local area plans were up to date, which would have addressed the key roadblock preventing the building of hundreds of homes across Wicklow.
The whole matter raises serious questions as to what the six elected representatives were doing on the Planning SPC for the duration of the last Council.
The role of Chairperson of the Planning SPC is a paid role, which begs a further question, as to what they were actually getting paid for, as the core functions of the SPC were quite clearly not being carried out.
That this would take place in the middle of a housing crisis is inexcusable. There are literally thousands of families across Wicklow who are struggling with crippling rents, many more are struggling to avoid homelessness as numbers of homeless across the state rise to record levels.
The obvious and disturbing additional impact of the failure to build what amounts to just under 700 houses, is the inflationary effect it will have on existing housing stock. This will push house prices up further.
Wicklow is already one of the most expensive counties in the state to have a mortgage in after Dublin. But this will push house prices up even further.
Added to this the SPC failure has also impacted on the development of the social housing stock in Wicklow, as ten percent of the affected developments would have been given over to social housing. Of which there is a huge shortage in the County.
We have a generation of young people emigrating from our shores for the simple reason that they do not believe that they will ever own a home in Ireland as a result of the abject failure of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to address the housing crisis, which these parties brought about through their failed policies.
We need answers as to how this was allowed to happen.
We need answers as to how this is going to be remedied.
And we need answers for the hundreds of families across Wicklow who will not be offered the opportunity to buy their own home as a result of the failure of the SPC.” ENDs