OPINION:Becalmed by recession, Ireland now has the time to reform a planning process that has been more sport than system, writes BRENDAN GLEESON
SINCE THE economic collapse, a steady parade of ex-politicians and developers has made its way through Irish courts responding to charges of planning corruption. I sense from afar popular cynicism about the possibilities for justice in a political atmosphere marked by fatigue, anxiety and anger. Great idols have fallen but have the Big Men gone with them? Many believe things won’t change. A few token sentences and slaps on wrists and the cute hoors will be back in business.
Maybe, but there isn’t much business to get back into currently, especially in land development. The recent Haunted Landscape report from the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, and the inquiries that have followed it, show how much housing will have to be consumed or disposed of before normality returns to the development sector. The moot point is what development normality should be. Surely not the “routine madness” of the boom years? Everything suggests it should be redefined to include new concepts, such as probity, process and planning.
The times seem propitious for this redefinition. Justice is reasserting itself, the system catching up with a good few nefarious types. It will not get all the wrongdoers, but the stream of prosecutions sounds out a warning that will reverberate for some time. As the old military adage goes, there’s nothing like a good hanging to encourage the troops. But better behaviour will not firmly reset the compass of process in the planning and development sectors. This necessitates the harder work of system overhaul.
What the times further offer is time itself, for critical introspection, reform and recommitment to the higher ideals that animated the founders of the republic. Some very positive moves in this direction have begun. Ministerial statements welcoming successful prosecutions of the grafters are an important rhetorical gift to renewal. This replaces special pleading from on high for the “contributions” of the fallen. Absolution is properly for the confessional, not the courts. The vast damage to the national economy and civil society by corruption cannot be discounted by past good works. Payback begins in the prison yard or in community service. Forgiveness follows sentence.
We commonly associate the idea of official graft with governance dysfunction in the Third World. This neatly closes off the broader record of sleaze in land development in western countries.
Ireland is not the only developed nation to have covered a grotesque development process with the cloak of administrative normality. In many countries, especially the English-speaking world, development is or has been more sport than system – what the renowned German sociologist Ulrich Beck might term “organised irresponsibility”. The metaphor of the “brown paper envelope” is well understood in the UK, Australia, the USA and beyond.
An illustrative word on my own country. Australia’s development history is, as the historian Geoffrey Bolton describes it, a tale of “spoils and spoilers”. White settlers unleashed a rough-handed growth model that saw the land as an enemy to be vanquished. Its original owners were no more than troublesome fauna. Pioneering development necessitated that they be contained and, if necessary, culled.
In Australia’s cities, the “development game” has been our national code. Urban academic Leonie Sandercock exposed The Land Racket in her 1979 book. It was a match fixed by corruption and shallow municipal politics. Frequently, land speculation was anything but speculative. The outcomes were locked in through graft and patronage.
A cycle of favourable rezonings and resumptions propelled planning at the municipal level, where no structures existed to identify, let alone censure, petty corruption. Sound familiar to Irish ears?
So much for that. The point is to seize the opportunity when it arises to break from what historians term “path dependency”. In Australia, opportunities for reform were often missed but not always. Major corruption scandals in the 1970s and 1980s inflamed public sentiment to the point where purgative action was the only course. The long-suffering advocates of justice were emboldened and institutions forced or inspired to fulfil their most basic obligations to the public interest.
Inquiries, commissions, apocalyptic elections had their consequences – jailings, shamings (sometimes just as important) and electoral annihilation. In their wake followed new structures and processes that aimed to restore (was it ever there?) probity in officialdom and its most tempting sideshow, the development process.
Several Australian states established permanent judicial watchdogs, corruption commissions with sweeping powers to counteract dishonesty, especially at the municipal level. In addition, government land agencies have acted as a potent correcting force in the urban development process, pursuing good planning and returning development windfalls to the public purse.
Ireland, becalmed by recession, has the chance to break from its own path dependencies, especially in land development. The horrible legacies of the boom storm – the ruined rural and coastal vistas – will continue to discomfit native and visitor alike for a very long time.
Yet work is under way to overhaul the demented institutional “normality” that produced this. The recent Planning Development Act 2010 seems a major advance, reining in municipal development “control” systems. Hopefully this signals a stronger voice and role for Irish planners. Their sound advice was too often trampled upon during the crazy-brave days of the tiger.
Finally, the Department of Finance must acknowledge the importance of stronger planning to Ireland’s economic renewal. History, including your own recent experience, makes this clear: laissez-faire land development always ends in tears.
A worthy legacy of the failed tiger is a vision of Ireland freed from perennial weeping. Time perhaps to make the connection.
Brendan Gleeson is professor of urban policy and management at Griffith University, Brisbane. From January 2011 he will be professor of geography and deputy director of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth