What is the biggest single issue facing Ireland’s economy?
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Why is delivering housing and infrastructure the biggest issue for Ireland's economy?
Getting houses built and infrastructure in general is the biggest single issue facing Ireland's economy, but doing so is becoming increasingly difficult. The number of judicial reviews on planning decisions are on target to double this year compared to last year, and only this week a local goose population prevented the building of 600 homes in Dublin. My next guest built 2,400 homes last year, up 77% on the previous year. But he's exasperated at the pace of getting things done in this country. He's Stephen Garvey and he's the Chief Executive of Glenveigh Homes and is sitting in front of me. Good morning, Stephen. Good morning, Joe. Why can't we get stuff done here?
It's a really good question. I think things dramatically changed after the global financial crisis. I think we handed a lot of our responsibilities over to various agencies. I think we removed risk taking from the system.
How did the global financial crisis change Ireland's planning and building capacity?
We pretty much, you know, endorsed a system where doing nothing was a safer place to be than actually taking the risk on. And we've seen that across the sector. We've also suffered from many aspects of we wiped out our entire building sector when the global financial crisis came in. We then started to, we implemented a national planning framework, which identified the population growth will only be 33,000 people per year, or 33,000 units per year. We now need 50,000 plus units a year. So we grossly underestimated. We obviously endorsed the Our House Convention into our legal system.
And I suppose from there... This is for environmental impact statements.
Yeah. In 1997, the European Commission endorsed the Our House Convention. That's where it started from. And then it came into force in Ireland around 2010.
What role do judicial reviews and the Aarhus Convention play in delaying development?
And we've really seen a pickup in judicial reviews around 2014, 2015, the starts come on. And then obviously we've seen high momentum. So our estimation is about 37,000 houses have been stopped or delayed due to judicial reviews.
And let's break down some of the stuff you said there. Why are there so many judicial reviews? And who can we kind of point the finger at to a certain extent?
You can point the finger to a lot, but I think what we should look at is, I think what we tried to do was reform our planning system to adapt to deliver faster decisions. We obviously created an SHD system, which was Strategic Housing Development. That bypassed the local authorities and went straight on board Panalla. And the problem was that was that board can all work from a national standards basis and to a degree will ignore local area. They'll take them into account, but they'll ignore some of the facts. And so if you have national standards in relation to density and things like that, all of these collided together. So what I suppose national standards due to the national planning framework was increased density.
So, you know, people say out there developers drive density. It's actually the planning system drives density. Developers respond.
How did Strategic Housing Development (SHD) and national planning standards affect local planning?
Because the planning system wants you to build near transportation nodes. Exactly. It's not even in transportation nodes. It's in small towns, small villages. We have to build higher densities. We've tried to reform that. And obviously the introduction of compact growth guidelines two years ago is a real positive. We can now reduce the quantum of high density in these more suburban locations. But there's bigger fundamental issues, like if you look at our infrastructure, and I would frame it, I don't want to use these words lightly, the most important document probably in the last 15, 16 years is about to come to us, which is the the Department of Expenditure's task force in reforms that are required.
This is the Seán O'Driscoll route. This is the Seán O'Driscoll route. And I would estimate that that action plan, and it needs to be an action plan. Rather than just a memo. If it's a memo on a report, it's just going to sit in a desk and nothing's going to happen. It actually has to be an action plan. And I would estimate that that action plan has the ability to save this economy somewhere between 50 and 100 billion euros.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is delivering housing and infrastructure the biggest issue for Ireland's economy?
0:01–1:02
2
How did the global financial crisis change Ireland's planning and building capacity?
1:02–1:48
3
What role do judicial reviews and the Aarhus Convention play in delaying development?
1:48–3:04
4
How did Strategic Housing Development (SHD) and national planning standards affect local planning?
3:04–4:35
5
What savings and economic gains could a Seán O'Driscoll action plan deliver for infrastructure?
4:35–6:09
6
Which systemic reforms are proposed to speed up housing delivery by 2030?
6:09–6:59
7
How has Glenveagh Homes scaled up construction and what are their financial margins?
6:59–7:37
8
What barriers do capital markets and governance create for housing SMEs in Ireland?
7:37–8:11