A chara, – As people concerned about climate change, we are planning to retrofit our home through external insulation, and upgrading to a heat pump. We live in a bog-standard 1970s pebble-dashed semi, with no particular architectural features, and no murals of dancing ballerinas. A number of our neighbours, including the other half of our semi, have already wrapped their homes, thankfully without any planning retribution.
However, after the case of the Kilnamanagh family threatened with fines for wrapping their home without planning permission, I contacted our local authority, Dún Laoghaire Rathdown, to ask if external insulation for our home would be exempt. In reply, they asked me to submit an Exemption Declaration Section 5 application, at a cost of €80, and said a planner would issue a decision within four weeks.
So I did the maths. Ireland’s Climate Action Plan calls for retrofitting 500,000 homes by 2030, and there are 437,000 houses still to go. Could our council planning system possibly process that many applications for exemptions over the next five years? Not to mention the remaining 1.2 million pre-2016 homes that will still remain to be retrofitted once the 2030 target has been achieved?
A shortage of planners is already one of the reasons being cited for sluggish delivery of new homes in a housing emergency. If they are too busy deciding people don’t need planning to wrap existing houses, how can they possibly have time to plan for the new homes we need?
We are also in a climate emergency. Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary applications for planning exemptions is hardly the most streamlined way to encourage people to upgrade insulation of their homes. Like the sensible decision to exempt roof solar panels from planning requirements, a similar fix is urgently needed now to clarify the law around wrapping houses of no special aesthetic or historical merit. – Yours, etc,
EITHNE FITZGERALD,
Dublin 16.
