The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, sees his gargantuan Planning Bill, published yesterday, as an attempt to balance many different interests in the planning process, where conflict between developers and objectors is as inevitable as night following day.
The legislation, with 245 sections, contains something for everyone, though not quite as much as either side was seeking. The development lobby wanted to cut out third parties as much as possible while these objectors sought to defend their traditional rights.
Moves which curtail these rights, such as the requirement that any third party appealing to An Bord Pleanala must first have expressed its views to the relevant local authority, and paid for the privilege, may be seen as concessions to sweeten the social housing measure in the Bill.
This will require developers to sell local authorities, at agricultural land prices, up to 20 per cent of every site of more than half an acre they acquire from yesterday for development by the authorities as "social and affordable" housing. Nobody knows how this will work in practice.
Will builders hive off the worst possible part of every site to fulfil the 20 per cent requirement? And if so, will these areas become new ghettos in the corner of an otherwise private housing estate?
Unlike Britain, there is not a well-established housing association movement here, occupying a middle ground between the public and private sectors and offering affordable accommodation for rent to those who cannot afford to shoulder the burden of large mortgages.
Housing in Dublin and other cities is at least as socially stratified as it is in Britain, if not more so. The last thing many first-time house buyers want to hear is that a local authority estate is to be built nearby. Now they might be living cheek by jowl with public housing.
The Bill is intended to encourage integration. "We have paid a very high price for all the ghettos we've created because of segregationist policies in the past," said one senior official.
It must also be noted that the 20 per cent figure is a maximum and it also hinges on local authorities preparing housing strategies. As the Minister explained, the housing need in some local authority areas may not be as pressing as elsewhere, so the proportion could be lower.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the measure will bring down land prices after it finally kicks in. That, too, is part of the agenda. The same could happen to house prices, if only because of the lack of public acceptability for the very idea of socially mixed housing areas.
That is one of the reasons an option to purchase "affordable housing" has been included, subject to claw-back provisions to prevent profiteering. The culture of home ownership is so strong in Ireland that offering such units for sale, as well as for rent, had to be included.
The Bill does not address the issue of quality, as the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland has complained. It wants the draft legislation amended to provide "mechanisms . . . to ensure that only high-quality, well-designed buildings are constructed in this country".
For many years, some planners have complained that a local authority has no right to refuse permission for development purely on aesthetic grounds. The Bill does not change this, perhaps because it is simply not possible.
Its authors do point out, however, that the issue of quality will be addressed in the context of guidelines favouring higher housing densities. As last year's Bacon Report stressed, the success of such housing will depend on a much higher level of design input.
The development lobby's biggest coup, however, is the provision in the Bill for designating "strategic development zones" where sites can be offered on a plate to multinational companies, but how the environmental impact is to be assessed is still unclear.
The Bill's provisions for local area, county and city development and strategic regional plans will also require a lot more detailed planning, and it is clear the relevant authorities have not got enough planners to do this.
One consultant said: "We have only one university degree course in planning, at UCD. It's only turning out about 25 planners a year and virtually all of them are snapped up by the private sector." Mr Feargal MacCabe, who was the Bacon Report's planning consultant, said he "fully applauded" the provision requiring third parties to reveal themselves to a local authority at the outset, instead of "turning up out of the blue" with appeals to An Bord Pleanala.
However, the proposal to levy a fee of around £20 for making observations on a planning application is widely viewed as a mechanism to curtail the input of third parties. It would, for example, put the Dublin city branch of An Taisce out of business in two months.
Its chairman, Mr Michael Smith, said it made between seven and 10 observations per week on planning applications and could not afford to pay such a fee. Yet, as a public interest conservation group, its input had been welcomed by Dublin Corporation and An Bord Pleanala.
Mr Smith declined to comment on how Lancefort Ltd, set up by him and others to fight high-profile planning cases, would be affected by the Bill's requirement that anyone seeking a judicial review would have to prove a "substantial interest". He said some of the other provisions were excellent, such as those on enforcement as well as the redefinition of the respective roles of An Bord Pleanala and the Environmental Protection Agency and the inclusion of "sustainable development" as a primary objective.
Mr Dempsey deserves credit for having the courage and foresight to initiate the first major review of Irish planning legislation for more than 35 years, and to consolidate all of the existing planning legislation in a single Act.