It's Fourth of July, so, God Bless America:

I spent a bit of time lately checking out various planning situations in Wicklow which folks had brought to my attention.  Mainly, I was interested in getting my head around that Abwood mystery you might have read about where a factory owner on the N11 extended his premises, was ordered by the Council to stop, lodged an application for retention, site rezoning required, everybody singing from different hymn sheets and whatever and so on and such.

Anyway, more on that next week. In the course of my perusals I came across a predicament where an applicant was looking for permission to build a house in a visually sensitive area. ‘Local/rural need’ rules applied as well. Now, I don’t know how someone with a degree in spatial planning is considered qualified to rule on a housing matter based on an opinion of people’s personal circumstances – surely this is something that can only really be decided by the courts: or, at least by people with some kind of professional background in community law: or, at least by some non-partisan authority. Anyway, leaving aside all of that (which one day will be the subject of a massive Tribunal), one of the things the planner’s report mentioned was that, while the proposed house wasn’t visually intrusive in the visually sensitive area, the Sugarloaf Mountain was visible from the site. And this, somehow… contributed to the fact that the planner was recommending a refusal. 

Now. Can you imagine proposing a housing development in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown from which site the Dublin Mountains wouldn’t be visible? If visibility of the Dublin Mountains, Howth Head, Lambay Island and the Wicklow Mountains were a criteria for future development, Dublin wouldn’t exist. In fact, no matter where your site for proposed development is located in this country, some natural feature is going to be visible.

The applicant in question doesn’t have the resources necessary to make the planning authority see things in the way that resources tend to make planning authorities see things. So his only hope is to wait for a change of personnel where, as usual, there’s a fifty/fifty chance that some new planner will interpret ‘local need’ and ‘visual sensitivity’ guidelines in a different way.

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Just a quick word on a ‘local need’ story in Clare (where else?). This week’s Champion has an article about a young man, Robert O’Neill, who, in 2006, applied for permission to build a house for himself adjacent to his parents’ house in a rural area. The 27 year old suffers from an exceptionally debilitating genetic skin disease which will lead (if it hasn’t already) to him having part of his leg amputated. In other words, his case is extremely special. The Council dragged their heels and eventually indicated that they would be refusing his application. Robert says that the stress of dealing with the Council actually made his condition worse. He eventually got planning.

No way to run a country. We’re all complicit.

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Only a couple of months back, Dun Laoighre Rathdown announced what amounted to a moratorium - a ban, in other words - on pretty much all future development in the Sandyford area because the sewage and water supply systems were stretched beyond capacity. The Times report from February ran as follows:

Developments of more than two residential units, or the equivalent amount of commercial space, will not be granted planning permission. The drainage problem was identified when sewer pipes of an inadequate capacity were found between the Sandyford / Stillorgan catchment area and the West Pier pumping station.

‘‘These pipes will need to be upgraded,” Keegan (Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Manager) said. ‘‘The council is proceeding to plan the necessary upgrade work. (A previously published) study has also recommended the construction of foul water storage facilities at different locations in the catchment area with a possible new overflow to the surface water system during significant rainfall.”

Does anyone know the precise reason why this moratorium – which applied to some of the most overpriced-yet-to-be-developed land in the country – was so suddenly turned around just a couple of weeks ago? Were the pipes upgraded? Is the sewage system improved? Has the local authority got its act together? What’s the deal here - anybody know what happened? Point me to some file and I’ll go looking. 

Meanwhile, happy planning!

Before I forget, does anyone know what building Bertie’s new offices (for which more than €220,000 (cost of building a standard house) has been spent on renovating) are located in? By any chance are we talking ‘Protected Structure’? If so, did anyone lodge a planning application for approval? I'm not being rhetorical, I'd genuinely like to know.

Anyway, when I was passed on the link to Bertie’s new self promoting website http://bertieahernoffice.org/video.php , I, like everybody else I’m sure, thought to myself: ‘has that nice spoofy-comedic set up, but I’m seeing any punchline?’ (unlike the excellent ‘Cowen’s Downfall’ which has been doing the rounds on YouTube this week: sorry - too many rude words in it for me to post on this site, but if that kind of thing doesn’t offend you, it’s really worth Googling). Turns out it’s not an intended joke after all but, rather, the start of Bertie’s campaign to become our next president! Apparently he feels comfortable about doing this because of something to do with the peace process…

Anyway, Bertie was forever justifying personal pay increases, perks and the like on the basis that, were he working in the private sector, he’d be earning so much more money than he was as Taoiseach.

But doing what, I’ve often wondered? Even if it were possible to make the kind of money he was talking about in his old job totting up figures in some back office at the HSE, on the strength of his evidence to the Mahon Tribunal, during which he showed no aptitude to handle any kind of account whatsoever, I couldn’t imagine him rising to the top of that particular career ladder.

So what, exactly, would Bertie do in private life to make the kind of money he thinks he’s worth…

How about this: does anyone agree that he’d make a great (with the utmost respect to all you Quantity Surveyors whom I consider to be amongst my closest friends and who these days are more Project Delivery Strategists than the old fashioned Quantity Surveyors of yore, so please don’t be offended) Quantity Surveyor? What do you think?

Can’t you imagine him – the guy at the Design Team meetings, forever destined to almost fall asleep when the architect and services engineer get to the part about ‘embodied energy’? Occasionally interjecting ‘we might just want to explore the capital cost consequences (of, say, having each individual piece of glass hand made in Murano) before confirming that order’ (as nobody else pays the slightest bit of attention)? Overcompensating for the fact that doesn’t do black cashmere polo-necks by sporting a made to measure Louis Copeland with Peter Sutherland cufflinks and an oversparkly tie? Arriving at site meetings in the car with the best resale value?  Politely showing up at team-bonding Bloomsday picnics wondering why on earth the bird on the stage keeps shouting ‘yes!’ over and over again.

I received an email from architect Russell Moffat, of Butler Moffat Architects in Cork. Russell, it turns out, was raised in Zimbabwe and maintains contact with friends still living there. Recently they sent him some photographs of Robert Mugabe’s just finished house which they are eager to have published on the web. They’d like people to know how much energy Mugabe can put into realizing such palatial pap while the rest of the country falls to pieces.

 

If you feel strongly about it, there’s a petition you can sign to assist those who are trying to get Mugabe out of Zimbabwe: 

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_zimbabwe/97.php?cl_tf_sign=1

What I really want to know is, how did he get around their One Off Houses In The Countryside guidelines?

 

This is a new public art project which has just been opened in New York. I know they've put giant waterfalls directly underneath the Brooklyn Bridge against the piers but, obviously, they've put them elsewhere in the East River.

 

A quick follow up on that situation in Hunters Run in Clonee where local residents are going out of their minds because of the parking situation Fingal Council has caused in their estate. One local resident got an email from the County Manager last week which, amongst a number of suggestions offering advice to the resident on how s/he should be complaining to the council (‘stop bothering us, we’ll get back eventually and you'll get what's good for you’ kind of thing) states that putting together a Traffic Management Plan for the area would have been ‘unprecedented’. Well, Fingal, sounds like its time you sat down and carried out a precendent establishing exercise.

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Don’t forget, lads, I’m still looking for Protected Structures (listed buildings) which are falling where they stand because the planning authorities are being way overly picky on planning applications, leading to planning refusals and, thereby, making bad situations worse.

I’m also looking for towns and villages around the country where the local authority is responsible for making them visually as unattractive as, or even less attractive than, Gort.

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Much obliged to all for showing restraint in not actually naming the names of one or two planning folks who’ve been making impressions for all the wrong reasons lately.

But thanks, too, for reminding me about the planner who, despite being a psychopath, might have been said to have made a positive contribution during his career by approving anything put before him so long as it was made of red brick. This planner was known to stick forks into architects he didn’t like at alcohol fuelled corporate lunches, but I can’t ever say this happened to me personally (perhaps because on the single occasion I met him on a business matter following one such lunch, he actually passed out (passed out might be a bit of an exaggeration: laid his head on his desk and began babbling incoherently is a more accurate description. Anyway, I slipped out of his office, leaving the radio on (they were talking about the Flood Tribunal) in the hope that it would discourage people from entering until he’d had time to recover)). I was also spared the (at least two) occasions when parts of his anatomy escaped cover just as he happened to brush past attractive women at packed social events. Thankfully, on both occasions some decent people (not, I hasten to add, architects who had planning applications due to come before him for adjudication) clocked him one.

It’s not all that long ago since this kind of crap was going on. And it really was going on - sure, I'm using a little flowery rhetoric and hyperbole to get your attention, but it really did happen. Not all that long ago either - it's not as if we can all explain away our cowardice and lack of integrity by saying ‘oh, that’s the way things were done in the nineties’.

I’m not saying that there are any fork-sticking flashers in senior positions in planning authorities any more (although there may be a chair thrower) but the culture which allowed this kind of thing to happen has never been put under scrutiny. It’s not just enough to glibly announce ‘things have changed’. Situations have changed, personalities have changed but the structures and institutions and opportunities to which allow this kind of nonsense to occur remain the same. All a lunatic like Planner X requires is opportunity. And when that happens, we'll continue to turn a blind eye.

You all saw this over the weekend. An artful picture of Christiano Ronaldo diving from a yacht in the Med.

It looks less artful right way up. For example, what is that kid doing, exactly, in the background?

Public Private Partnership is an unbreakable colt out of a mare called Celtic Tiger by a sire named Lucifer. After a dodgy showing in Infirmary Road a few weeks ago, his career came to an end at Heustongate last weekend.

In a comment from two posts ago, Emer, asked to see the text of the famous David Keane letter to Clare County Council of last year during which he accused the Council of incompetence. I dug out a copy and you’ll find it after the jump.

I always thought the shrub topiary on the roundabout near Cork Airport was the Green Party Executive jet, because it’s made from locally sourced renewable materials, probably is carbon neutral and never goes nowhere.

Paul Lee, though, says it’s an environmental improvement project supposed to welcome visitors to Cork.

Only one of us can be right.

(Actually, Paul, is reminds me of the time when I used to work in the architect’s department of a Local Authority. The rule was that on all publicly procured projects, 1% of the total budged had to be set aside for artwork - ‘one-per-cent-art’ as us local authority types called it.

Driving along a newly completely motorway with my charlatan smart-arse brother one day, he wondered what the hell the stacked pile of turf was doing near the margin. ‘That’s one-per-cent-art,’ I explained. ‘Oh yeah?’ he said, ‘and what’s the other ninety nine per cent?’)  

Never before having read the Mail on Sunday, I missed this recent article:

If the amount of paperwork involved in even the smallest most insignificant application for planning development were any way to judge, we should have the most beautiful cities and towns in the world. Yet we don’t.

One of my favourite places to visit is Gort in County Galway. It’s got great little restaurants, nice bars, a river, some quiet little retreats and the most fantastic community spirit (half the town is Brazilian!) you’ll find in the whole of Ireland. Yet if you were to visit Gort for the first time and didn’t know how great a place it really is, nothing would encourage you to get out of your car – you’d be forgiven for thinking that Gort is, quite frankly, a bit of a hole.

Here’s why. While individual building owners, planning applicants and general townsfolk are made jump through hoops dealing with Galway County Council to make little modifications no one would ever really notice to their houses and premises, everything that the Council itself (and the other service providers like the ESB, Eircom, etc.) are responsible for – roads, paths, street furniture, lighting, landscaping, parking arrangements, overhead cables, etc. – is absolutely atrocious. I can't make up my mind which is the worst part: the parking area in the central triangle that looks like an open air car auction in the most out of the way town on the vast planes of North America;

or the multi-layered footpaths so steep you could abseil down them;

or the overhead wires the very sight of which is enough to give you tinnitus…

The contrast between the fine experience of sitting in one of Gort’s pleasant cafes and the frontier town experience of standing in the middle of the main square is quite somethin’.

Not just Gort, of course. Dozens of great little places around the country could double for Ukrainian towns in a C4 documentary about the devastating effects of Chernobyl. Is it maybe time that the responsibility for taking care of our town and village centres is taken away from the councils and handed over to the community? Gort would be in great hands if that were to happen.

Interested to hear about other places which would look less neglected if the council had nothing do to with them. Photos welcome.

I’m sorry, all you folks in Kilrush, Carrick-on-Suir, Carlow Town, Ballina and everywhere else embroiled in planning/local authority situations which have no prospect of being resolved – the Minister’s comments aren’t intended for you because your situation is 'local' and Ministers don’t get involved in local situations. On the other hand, Dartmouth Square – where some fruit is driving South Dublin residents insane by threatening to establish a car park on their leafy green while he waits to see how much he can extort from the Council on some lease-hold technicality – is in Rathmines, Dublin, so that makes it a national issue and therefore worthy of the Minister’s attention. The litter situation in Dartmouth Square is just so, so bad that, as the Irish Times reported Saturday, John Gormley just had to meet with Dartmouth Square residents sometime last week to allay fears:
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0621/1213999756838.html

People of Kilrush, I suppose the message here is: keep it real. If you want the Minister’s attention stop fussing over serious threats and menacing behaviour and anarchic scenes at Town Council meetings and all that kind of thing: its how overgrown and littered everything is that counts.

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Oh, and remember last week I mentioned that the Public Accounts Committee is likely to give the Ballymun Regeneration €.5 billion overrun an easy time of it in its final report in September? Well both the Times and RTE ran lovely little infomercials for Ballymun Regeneration Ltd late last week. Here's the Times piece: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0620/1213911839444.html

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The Wicklow person who sent me a message on Saturday afternoon/evening, can you email me again please? I’ve tried replying to your email address but I keep getting failure messages.

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Given all that’s being going on in County Clare in the past while, what with the new Kilrush Town Hall situation, the Clare County Councillors work to rule, the mayhem at the last Council meeting and so on, I was surprised (I shouldn’t be, I know) to see what the Irish Times a few days ago found worth reporting on from the Banner:

CLARE COUNTY Council has spent €750,000 acquiring a parcel of land for the upgrading of a railway project. The two acres of land and house are owned by John O'Connell (84), father of the Mayor of Clare, Cllr Patricia McCarthy (Ind). However, Cllr McCarthy absented herself from the decision…

A whole €750,000! Heavens above, aren’t they just pure mad in Clare.

This €750,000 Council transaction is hardly worth talking about unless it’s to make that obvious connection between the land owner and the Mayor and to gratuitously repeat (as the piece does) that Cllr. McCarthy absented herself from meetings involving the purchase as if to imply – I don’t know – something. This ain’t no story. Anybody know how it got in the IT when everything else is ignored?

.. (sorry, I've been listening to Duke Spirit).

This is an engineer's idea of a joke. It's why why architects are so reluctant to invite them to social events...

This will distract you for 30 seconds

http://www.illusionsciences.com/ 

This is kind of cool...

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080617/MULTI/80617040

This is a task that will never get done...

So lets say you’re a small GAA or soccer club in the west of Ireland, or a doctor’s clinic on the outskirts of a midlands town or a beauticians near, oh, wherever and you lodge a planning application to extend, say, a bathroom or something and the planners send you a pesky letter telling you to submit a Traffic Impact Assessment. Such fuss and bother: all those unfocussed, unjoined-up, cut and paste reports costing €1,500 min. + VAT, which don’t mean all that much as they slowly make their way along some planning authority shelf to an inevitable rendezvous with a recycling bin… But at least, you console yourself, it’s not just you: everybody has to get these reports.

Person of the Week

Madelaine Taylor Quinn

While I was rummaging around in the latest edition of the Clare People to see if they'd run my little planning ad, I couldn’t help but notice some pretty informed and plucky coverage on planning matters in general. I was particularly impressed with journalist Claire Gallagher’s handling of the anarchy in Kilrush. By all accounts it’s not an easy story to cover: there’s talk going around that a recent threat to a local businessman was taken so seriously that the Emergency Response Unit was called in.

Amongst the People’s more interesting stories was a case where two brothers from Corofin had each applied for planning permission to build houses for themselves. One received planning permission. The other didn’t. Apparently, because Brother Number 2 had spent some time in Dublin he didn’t qualify as a local.

Meanwhile, elsewhere the People told of a Dublin business man who managed to have the 'local' rules suspended for his application for a large family house somewhere outside Ennis.

Oh, then there was something about a gentleman who wanted €550,000 to withdraw an objection to an Board Planala. I thought we were still pretending this kind of thing didn't happen but following the news of a similar situation in Kerry a couple of months ago I guess it's no longer taboo.

And then there was this. Planorexia.
http://www.clarepeople.com/content/view/1676/864/

If you are having a frustrating or difficult time on a planning application; if you feel you are being treated unfairly by the planning authority; or if you think that the Council is being in any way unreasonable with you on a planning matter, email me in complete confidence at info@garrymiley.com or go to my website at www.garrymiley.com 

Since then the Clare Champion appears to have declined as well. They didn’t contact me about it or anything, they just simply didn’t run the ad.

 

I've also sent the ad to the Clare People: now, it may be that my email didn’t reach the classifieds section in time, but the ad didn’t appear in the People’s Tuesday edition.  Interestingly, this did however.

 

 

So the Ombudsman’s money is good but not mine, I take it.

 

After I posted on this topic last week I mentioned that I got emails from people saying that the local papers depend so much on the local authorities for revenue that they are very unlikely to run something which would offend a good client.

 

And then Cllr. Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin of Cork County Council added another twist to the situation: he feels quite sure that a press release he put out on Monday was ignored by his local media because he was criticising a prolific ad-taking developer. It was like this: a builder in Clonakilty had blocked up a section of public path with a hoarding. In response to complaints from numerous irate citizens, Cllr. Ó Súilleabháin raised the matter with various officials. Nothing happened. Finally he put out a statement – the kind of thing you would normally expect to find in the local paper – to try to provoke some kind of response. Nobody would publish it.

Remember that Public Accounts Committee Hearing into the Half Billion (I must be misprouncing the words Half Billion - no one seems to be taking any notice) cost overrun on the Ballymun Regeneration Project? Last week I posted that, with the exception of FF’s John Curran, the PAC had given Department officials an easy ride at the Leinster House hearing as regards where the money had gone and why the project was taking so long.

Since the hearings, John has been promoted to a Junior Ministerial position which means that his (and his alone serious) concerns about the situation will not make it into the Committee’s final report which is due in September. Apparently, there’s nobody around to take up the reigns form Deputy Curran: the unofficial word filtering back is that the Committee will let the whole thing slide. The half bill overrun is dead and buried.

There’s been so much debate in the past week about the sneaky underhanded reasons why 53% of the population voted no to Lisbon. First, No Voters were a bunch of unreformed republicans; yesterday it emerged they were in league with UK fascists and jailbirds. But it’s always gone unquestioned that the Yes Voters were a happy and benign bunch of Irish Government supporters. Last weekend, in the Guardian of London, Colm Toibín voiced an intriguing and heretofore unreported reason as to why some Irish people supported the Yes campaign. He reminded readers of how the Irish Government of the 1970s had to be forced by the European Commission to introduce equal pay for women and decriminalise homosexuality before concluding:

Dubya in Belfast yesterday.

I was at some meeting or other with some planner or other (guessing, not someone with a background in building construction) talking about a proposal for a Protected Structure. The building wasn’t all that important and had already been changed around quite a bit from its original condition. Seeking assurances that best conservation practise would be employed on the project, the planner remarked something to the effect that ‘it was important that the right thing be done by the building because, after all, the building is the client.’ The unusually poetic phrase lingered on my ear. How perceptive.

Until a friend of mine mentioned that another planner in a totally other local authority used the exact same phrase on a totally different project. Where are these non building professionals getting this dodgy metaphysical conservation philosophy from? Somebody's schooling them.

Anyway, I prefer Wittgenstein’s epithet that ‘the meaning is in the use’. Meaning, you can be as pernickety about the conservation details as you want, but if the building has no use, it has no meaning.

Which reminds me of the appeal I put out to you all a few weeks back looking for examples of how local authorities were assisting in the euthanasia of Protected Structures by being way overly picky on planning applications. Send me your examples.

Here’s another sampler: a fine little structure which has endured the Local Authority’s dictum that the ‘building is the client’ on more than one occasion over the past ten years.

This building in Salthill has been vacant and deteriorating ever since anyone can remember. A planning application lodged a couple of years back seeking to have it restored to use as a restaurant wasn’t considered ‘conservative’ enough by the powers that be. As a consequence, nothing happened (if you don’t count visits from vandals who camped out in it from time to time and almost managed to burn it down). It’s now before An Bord Planala on another application. I don’t know how much more do-gooding it can withstand. 

   (Janey, I should have used this image for the Bilderberg Post the other day.) 

Brian Cowen said awhile back that senior public servants should be given greater autonomy to take managed risks and to experiment more.  “For the future, we have to… make sure that people have more discretion… to provide good services for the public on the ground… The whole idea is… to encourage innovation, to encourage risk-taking, to try new things,’ etc., etc.,

Nice dream.

Look, who doesn’t want an innovative planning system? Nobody. Unfortunately giving even more discretion to an already discretion burdened planning cadre is not going to achieve it. In fact, if Cowen understood anything at all about why the public service is the mess that it is, he’d realise that the root of the problem is that too many officials are already too free to interpret legislation and guidelines in whatever way they see fit.

The very definition of chaos, to me, is an office full of local authority planners with discretion. Mr. Cowan should know that it’s the Executive – i.e., his own Cabinet – which needs to exercise more discretion, innovation and experimentation. Rather than having a bunch of jobbing vote catchers (his Ministers) sit as nominal heads of Departments – farming out decision making and policy implementation to quangos (HSE, DTA) and Secretaries General as they go –  the public service will remain on its knees until we move to the kind of system they have in other parts of the world where government departments are headed up by qualified people with real knowledge and real power to implement policy. It’s the only way forward.

At the start of The Planning Chronicles of Carrick-on-Suir, you might remember the whole thing kicked off when the Town Council initially refused to let Heitons home-furnishings suppliers take up space in an already completed retail park because the Council said Heitons wares weren’t ‘bulky’ enough to comply with the Department guidelines. Well, as many of you pointed out, if Carrick-on-Suir Town Council were reading the Guidelines correctly, eighteen other councils around the country which have allowed Heitons to quietly trade away must have read them incorrectly because, as we all know, if you’re looking for Heitons, the retail park is where you’ll find them (and bear in mind those councils who’ve given permission to kids birthday party organisers, Tons of Fun, to trade in retail parks – hardly what you call ‘traders in bulky goods’, eh?).

The Yes campaigners went on the various radio referendum aftermath shows to explain to us why we voted no. Apparently, we were looking for further concessions, but with tax harmonisation already conceded, neutrality guaranteed and euthanasia dead what more could we possibly ask for? One aspect of their analysis might have been interesting had it been teased out. As with Nice One, the referendum results showed there was a South-County-Dublin -v- the-rest-of-the-country divide. Much as it made the South Dublin pundits politely squirm to point it out, the fact remained that people from their area were a more affluent bunch and this somehow automatically made them both more informed and politically sophisticated (the implication being that people in other parts of the country were, well… whatever).

When, twenty years ago, I read a long article in my local newspaper - The Village Voice – attempting to convince me that the 150 most powerful, most influential people on the planet (Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, amongst them) were at that very moment shacked up in a top secret location deciding on the future of the universe, I simply didn’t believe it. It was just way too weird. And when the unhinged hack then insisted that this ultra elitist organization – known as the Bilderberg Group – had been meeting in secret every single year since the mid 50s, I decided it was time for me to get out of the East Village and live amongst the sane. First of all, what about the logistics? How do you get future US presidents (Bill Clinton 1991), CEOs of the world’s biggest companies, British Prime Ministers (Tony Blair), royalty (Prince Charles) and other ultra, ultra powerful types (George Soros) to coordinate their conflicting schedules and agree to create the biggest security nightmare imaginable by all arriving at the same place at the same time, all the while keeping the whole thing totally secret from the rest of the world? And, then, why would they bother?