Where's the builder?

Cllr. Gerry Reynolds (FG) seems to be getting himself in an awful twist about planning law.

In a statement issued to the papers a number of weeks back, Cllr. Reynolds claimed that Local Authorities are prevented by law from taking action on unfinished housing estates for 12 years after the developer has been granted planning permission.

I pointed out in a subsequent statement that this was nonsense. Section 34 of the Planning and Development Act, 2000 allows a Local Authority to require that an estate is finished with a certain time frame, provided that this time frame is at least 2 years from when works are commenced.

If this time frames elapses and the estate is not finished, the Local Authority can issue warning and enforcement notices to the developer, and ultimately use any security lodged by the developer to ensure the estate is finished.

Cllr. Reynolds then issued another statement saying that while this was factually correct, it did not make a difference, as this only related to ‘withering permissions and social and affordable housing’.

This is more nonsense.

A ‘ withering permission’ is a permission that is granted under a planning act that is still valid despite the planning act having been repealed to make way for a new act. Specific measures are normally included in new planning acts to deal with such permission, in order to prevent developers rushing through development before new regulations come into force. This was a particular issue in relation to Social and Affordable Housing, in that the rules on Social and Affordable Housing were significantly changed between the Planning and Development Act, 2000 and the Planning and Development (Amendment) Act, 2002.

What any of this has to do with unfinished housing estates, Cllr. Reynolds will have to explain.

Maybe he’ll provide an update on his website soon.

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I wrote a brief article for the website planningmatters.ie recently on the issue of Local Authorities and uncompleted housing estates.

You can access the article from this link.

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According to reports in today’s Leitrim Observer, all sitting Councillors and candidates in the Carrick on Shannon area have agreed not to use election posters in the forthcoming Local Elections.

Well, I’m a candidate in Carrick and Shannon and this is news to me.

2 weeks ago, I received a call from Cllr. Gerry Reynolds asking if I was interested in forming a consensus that no candidates would use posters.

I told Cllr. Reynolds that I had already ordered and paid for 30 posters, and that I did not agree with the initiative anyway, as it would unfairly advantage sitting Councillors, who have had 5 years, at the taxpayers expense, to promote their capabilities to the voters of County Leitrim.

This was the last I heard of the matter until I read the report in the Leitrim Observer. Clearly, the sitting Councillors are trying to pressurise new candidates like myself into submitting to their wishes. Personally, I find the idea of sitting Councillors deciding how other candidates should run their election campaigns to be a little undemocratic.

For what its worth, I will erect 30 election posters. These will be re-cyclable E-Board, not the highly polluting CorriBoard used by other parties. I will used bright green cable ties to erect these posters. All posters and ties will be removed by June 10th. I will not erect any poster on the main street of any town or village in the electoral area.

And all of my posters will feature a ‘Litter Costs Jobs’ message to promote awareness of tidy towns in the run up to the tourist season.

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