Planners frequently find themselves in the public’s crosshairs, blamed for everything from the housing crisis to the slow pace at which we are moving on climate targets. “There is a lot coming at our system,” admits Niall Cussen, chief executive of the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR). “It’s been the perfect storm – a huge amount of activity in the economy, huge housing need, huge infrastructural needs, and we have to do things differently because of climate change.”
But, he argues, “done properly” planning is central to meeting these challenges. And mostly, Cussen says, it is done properly. We hear about a minority of cases where something goes wrong, but nothing about the thousands of applications that local councils deal with every year where it all goes right. “A lot of good work goes on every day in planning authorities,” he says, “but there will be controversies about particular projects, and they will get all the headlines.”
Any improvements people see in our towns and cities “did not happen by accident. It happened because there was a plan”. Cussen does not have to look far for an example. His organisation’s offices are in Grangegorman, on Dublin’s north side, with Technological University Dublin almost on their doorstep. Cussen recalls that when he worked for the city council, the area was largely forgotten, cut off from the rest of the capital and marred by dereliction.
“Now there are thousands of students there every day, hundreds of people on the playing fields associated with the university,” he observes. The changes removed the physical barriers between the district and the rest of Dublin, making it easily accessible to the city centre. “And the same work is going on in many other parts of the country,” he points out. “The rejuvenation of the docklands in Cork, the same in Waterford and in Limerick.”
Equally, Cussen maintains he could pick lots of smaller towns – Clonmel in Co Tipperary and Ballina in Co Mayo, say – that are getting new leases of life.
He believes there was probably never a better time to be a planner. The Oireachtas recently passed the Planning and Development Act 2024, the third-largest piece of legislation in the State’s history. It is the system’s first overhaul in almost a quarter of a century. Among other things, it reforms An Bord Pleanála, the appeals body which also deals directly with nationally important infrastructure, creates a specialist court to deal with planning and environmental issues, and incorporates changes to speed up home building.
Cussen is confident the law will create the certainty that critics argue our system lacks. In fact, he is optimistic about many things. “This is an incredibly exciting time in terms of what we are witnessing in the development of our country,” he says.
“We are one of the few countries in the world that has a linked National Development Plan and national planning framework. There are billions of euro being invested in housing, water, transport, flood protection, sports, health, amenities and infrastructure.
“We have the resources, we have the updated laws, we have the updated policies, we have much more effective institutional arrangements, because we are committing very serious investment to infrastructure and there are high stakes in relation to achieving our climate targets.
“Put it all together – new planning Act, new national planning framework, our office, which is there in an oversight role, holding the local government system to account ensuring they’re zoning the right amount in the right locations in terms of housing – and that gives me great confidence for a reformed and better performing system.”
Work is under way on regulations that will add the fine detail to the new Act and enable its implementation. That will fall to the next government – Cussen was speaking before any election had been confirmed – and will take a few months.
A recurring complaint about our system is that plans end up in court too often. That became a feature of the strategic housing initiative, which allowed builders seek permission for big residential projects directly from An Bord Pleanála, subject to pre-application talks with the relevant local council. As time went on, many of them ended up mired in judicial review.
Cussen points out that access to justice is part of our democracy, while the new law creates a specialist planning court. He also argues that history could well be kinder to the strategic housing initiative, which was conceived at a time when applications for new home building had evaporated in the heat of a financial crisis.
“There’s no doubt that there were basic principles of how various things were adjudicated that got clouded,” he says. “But the intention was to create a pipeline of housing projects that could be put in place quite quickly, bearing in mind that the economy was turning quite fast.”
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Treating big housing developments like critical infrastructure and sending them straight to the appeals board seemed the best option given the crisis. So far, the response to its successor, Large Residential Developments, or LRD, which shifts responsibility back to councils, has been overwhelmingly positive. Cussen says it takes a lot of the positive aspects of the earlier initiative, particularly pre-planning consultations, which identify potential pitfalls early.
Part of the logic for the strategic housing initiative’s approach was that local authority planning departments were severely understaffed following recession-era Government spending cuts. Many have yet to fully recover. At the same time, boosting numbers in An Bord Pleanála, and elsewhere at national level, has soaked up more resources. Cussen cautions that for the new system to work, councils will need to hire more planners.
We don’t place vulnerable development in flood plains. We do encourage housing around public transport systems
— Niall Cussen
A recent ministerial action plan aims to address this, at least in part. That could stretch to luring professionals from abroad, including Irish people who emigrated when opportunities were thin on the ground here. It also involves training new planners. Cussen is keen to get across to school leavers that the profession now offers really good prospects. “There’s probably never been a better time to consider it as a career,” he says.
Universities offer planning at under- or postgraduate level. While there are courses in Dublin and Cork, there are none in other regions, so offering it in a western third-level institution is under active consideration. The ministerial plan includes “hard commitments in relation to boosting the output from universities, exploring bursaries, grant aid for people to take planning education, apprenticeships, student internships”. While people might once have worried that they would struggle to find a job once they qualified, that is not the case now, Cussen stresses.
His office will train local council planning department staff for the new law’s implementation. The OPR is also working making the system more efficient. A recent national planning portal that allows online applications to all local authorities is working well. Other initiatives the office is looking at include using technology to free up back-room staff, engaged mostly in routine administration work, to deal with the nuts and bolts of planning itself.
Training is one of the three areas for which the OPR, created in 2019, is responsible. “We provide training for the 949 local elected members across the country and the near 2,000 staff that work in the 31 local authorities, An Bord Pleanála and the regional assemblies,” Cussen explains.
Another is to ensure that county and city council development plans fit with national policies. “So, they’re prepared by democratic process, by local councillors, the local elected representatives, the staff and the officials in the different local authority areas,” he says. “And what we do is examine those plans in terms of how they all fit together and how they respond to, say, national policies around things like housing or climate or transport or flooding. We don’t place vulnerable development in flood plains. We do encourage housing around public transport systems.”
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If part of a development plan does not fit in with national policy, the office can recommend to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage that the provision is changed or removed.
Its third role is oversight of the planning bodies themselves. Recent controversies over An Bord Pleanála, one of which ended with the courts handing former deputy chairman, Paul Hyde, a suspended jail sentence for failing to declare his interest in two properties, thrust the office into the spotlight.
It published two reports, by independent figures from outside Ireland, into the board and how it functioned. Those findings formed the basis for reforms in the new Act. That will create a new planning commission with a separate governing board. The commission will deal specifically with planning and the board with corporate governance. As things stand, the board members of An Bord Pleanála do both, which means that the professional planners who decide on appeals and critical infrastructure applications are also responsible for the how the organisation is run.
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More broadly, the OPR oversees local council planning departments’ systems and procedures. “You know how accessible the public services are, what kind of information is available online, how responsive a local authority is to requests for pre-application consultations and so on,” Cussen explains.
“How they’re attending to all their actual statutory functions, from preparing development plans to your planning applications, planning enforcement, which is, you know, a significant area of concern that people would write to us about from time to time. So, we’ve conducted around 10 or so reviews of local authorities, and they’re all public.”
Originally from west Cork, Cussen’s family moved frequently as his father was a bank official. This left him with a keen interest in geography, on the one hand, and as the family often had to find new homes, in building and physical development on the other. He studied geography and economics at Maynooth before doing postgraduates in regional and urban planning in University College Dublin and environmental engineering in Trinity College Dublin.
He has worked in various local authorities, including Laois, Clare, Roscommon and Meath, then Dublin City Council. In July 2014 he became chief planner with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, where he had worked since 2000 in different professional roles. Cussen became the State’s first chief executive and planning regulator when Government established the Office of the Planning Regulator in April 2019.
This year he began his second five-year term in the post, at what he acknowledges is a critical time for the State’s planning system. He does not seem phased by it, arguing our challenges are “first-world challenges”.
He also notes that he is as invested as anyone else in seeing those challenges met, particularly on the housing front. But the big question for most is whether the State can tackle what has become a near-permanent crisis. “It can,” Cussen stresses, “if we put our minds to it.”
CV
Name: Niall Cussen.
Job: Chief executive and planning regulator, Office of the Planning Regulator.
Career: Qualified in geography, planning and environmental engineering, he has worked for county and city councils in Laois, Clare, Roscommon, Meath and Dublin, as well as An Bord Pleanála and as chief planner in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government.
Family: Married with two adult children.
Lives: Maynooth, Co Kildare
Something you might expect: He is a member and past president of the Irish Planning Institute.
Something that might surprise: He cycles to work in Grangegorman, Dublin from Maynooth, Co Kildare most days.
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