Professional planners no longer find Kerry a pleasant place to work in, and the county council is losing experienced staff as well as finding it difficult to attract replacements, the president of the Irish Planning Institute said yesterday.
Mr Ian Douglas was speaking as Kerry planners cancelled two weeks of appointments with the public to cope with the unprecedented number of Section 140 motions submitted by councillors for the April county council meeting.
The motions are being used to force through planning for developments refused by the planners or which it is felt would not gain approval.
Some of the developments likely to be approved at next Monday's meeting will never have gone through the planning process in the regular way.
Others will have been refused for reasons of public health, traffic hazard or interfering with sensitive areas of scenic landscape or heritage sites or for obtrusiveness in the landscape.
Councillors have only once in the recent past turned down a Section 140 put forward by colleagues, and all are voted through without a murmur by the required three-quarters majority of 22 councillors.
Only three councillors regularly abstain or vote against.
Planning in Kerry for long has been at crisis point, with stand-offs between management and a small group of councillors, mainly from the scenic Ring of Kerry and south Kerry coastal zone, an area with the most valuable sites and on which there is heavy demand for second homes as well as for family homes.
Councillors complain that the planners are too rigid.
Pressure from the public as well as from councillors in Kerry was driving staff out, Mr Douglas said on Radio Kerry yesterday.
"You are losing resources, you are losing staff. Kerry is becoming no longer a pleasant place to work in the planning profession," he said.
It was difficult to find replacements, and in any case these replacement staff needed time to settle in and get to know the area.
Mr Douglas attributed the planning staff dissatisfaction to a lack of job satisfaction arising out of inordinate and relentless pressure. What he called the councillors' "abuse" of the Section 140 motion was putting the instrument itself at risk.