County councillors reacted angrily to the fact that lands which have been zoned in the county under the Mayo County Development Plan, may have to be dezoned, under a new Planning and Development Act 2010.
The background to the Mayo County Development Plan, which was supposed to run from 2008 to 2014, had a long and drawn out gestation period before it was finally adopted in October 2009 following a long battle with the Minster for Environment John Gormley. The Minister ordered a number of changes to be made to the plan initially adopted by the councillors in 2008, which ended up with a delegation of councillors appearing before a Department of Environment Joint Oireachtas Committee, before a new ministerial directive was issued in September 2009 which was adopted by the council. However the issues that the elected members took, such as zoning of lands, could be a thing of the past since the introduction of the Planning and Development Act 2010, which has “far reaching consequences for the Mayo County Development Plan” according to director of services for Mayo County Council, Seamus Granahan.
At Monday’s meeting, Mr Granahan along with his colleague Ian Douglas, senior planner for Mayo County Council, gave the elected members of Mayo County Council a presentation of what the new Planning and Development Act 2010 will mean for them in the future. Mr Granahan outlined that under this new act, there is a stronger emphasis on regional planning guidelines and all Mayo plans will have to comply with these guidelines. Mr Douglas told the members that while there were 156 pages in the act, the most pressing thing in the act was that a core strategy must be implemented within a year of the regional plan coming into action — which it did at the end of September. “If we have too much land zoned, we’ll have to dezone accordingly, we’ll have to put a lot of thought into which lands we do this to,” he said. “If the members go against a manager’s report they will have to justify why they are going against the regional planning guidelines.”
Fine Gael councillor Michelle Mulherin told the meeting: “This represents an undermining of the input that councillors have, I believe that this act is trying to make sure that everything we do is of the thinking that the west of Ireland is a wildlife reserve for people from Dublin. We can’t now decide where our people live.”
Cllr Patsy O’Brien agreed. “You can built whatever kind of development you want in Dublin 4 but you can’t let the people of Mayo decide where they want to build, it’s unjust and unfair, it ties the hands of every local councillor,” he said. Fianna Fáil councillor Al McDonald, who was a strong opponent of the Minister’s intervention in the current Mayo Development Plan, told the meeting: “He has the regional authorities on board and he knows that the regional authority doesn’t have the same interests at heart as Mayo County Council. You can be sure that their guidelines will be at variance with what this council wants.”
Independent councillor Richard Finn commented on why so much land had to be zoned for building in the county. “There is a simple reason for the zoning of lands,” he said. “It’s because if you could only develop the areas close to the centre of towns, nobody could afford to buy the land to build on it.” Belmullet based councillor Gerry Coyle said that “the towns of rural Ireland are being bled dry by this bill,” while Independent councillor Gerry Ginty also hit out at the act. “I was brought up to believe that if somebody wants to build a house and it doesn’t directly affect his neighbour or the environment, they should be allowed,” Cllr Ginty said. “For God’s sake if someone wants to live here, let them live here.”
Mr Granahan told the members the council has 12 months to come up with a core strategy for all its development plans. “The population guidelines according to the Regional Planning Guidelines have to be followed, and we are expected to follow suit with them and rezone lands to comply,” he said. “The clock is ticking and this is going to have very serious implications for all our zoning in all our plans.”
