Abuses of the planning system, as detailed in the Flood tribunal's interim report, would continue to happen without legislative changes in how land is rezoned, a leading planner has warned.
Ms Rachel Kenny, president of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), the body that represents professional qualified planners, said radical changes needed to be made to restore public trust in the integrity and fairness of the planning process.
At the IPI's annual conference in Limerick yesterday, she said planners believed that wrongdoings over land rezoning "could occur again tomorrow, notwithstanding the introduction of public office and anti-corruption legislation."
"Legislative changes to date are not enough and do not appear to be producing the desired effect," Ms Kenny said." The mechanism for zoning or rezoning lands remains the same as that in existence during the 1980s and 1990s."
She pointed out that the zoning of land merely required a simple majority of elected members present for a meeting. And since there was no third-party appeal process, the public's ability to question any zoning decision was limited.
"The making of development plans has focused primarily on rezoning and the primary consideration appears to be 'whose turn it is to become a millionaire?', with decisions being made based on individual constituents interests over the common good."
Some councillors were "seemingly unperturbed by the threat of public shame or less still the threat of legal consequences for their actions", especially as section 150 of the 2000 Planning Act effectively allowed them to regulate their own conduct.
But rezoning was not a "victimless crime", Ms Kenny said. "It is the general community that has to pay the bill, whether in direct monetary terms or in the poor quality of development and lack of community that has characterised many of our suburban areas."
The IPI has recommended that all draft development plans providing for the zoning of land should be subject to public inquiry by an independent, external planning inspector from the Department of the Environment or An Bord Pleanála.
The institute's president cited two recent examples of "questionable or poor planning decisions" taken by local councillors against the strong advice of professional planners - one in Loughrea, Co Galway, and the other in Kenmare, Co Kerry.
In the case of Loughrea, a majority of Galway county councillors voted to rezone one landowner's property for industrial development "in the full knowledge that the land was earmarked for the building of the town's long-awaited bypass".
Ms Kenny said that facilitating one constituent was clearly more important than the advice they received. "The fact that they eventually backed down, in the face of threats by the National Roads Authority to shelve the bypass project, is little credit to them."
In the case of Kenmare, Kerry county councillors decided to rezone nine acres outside the town for development. Two successive applications for housing on the land were then granted by the council, only to be turned down on appeal. As a result, the landowner has recently been awarded compensation of €381,000, which the council will have to fund.
Its director of services, Mr Willie Wixted, said this should serve as a warning to councillors that they needed to pay attention to planning advice.
Ms Kenny told the conference that it may be time to consider diluting or removing responsibility from councillors for land zoning and rezoning, similar to the legislation introduced in relation to the adoption of the regional waste management plans.
