Analysis: Planners work to manage growth and guide it towards outcomes to benefit both communities and the environment
Most people don't realise how much of their daily environment, including parks, housing, transport and flood defences depends on urban planners and designers. And right now, Ireland is facing a chronic shortage of both, especially in local authorities.
Good planning isn’t just reactive; it’s proactive and people-focused. It's about how towns and cities can become more liveable, equitable and resilient in the face of growing social and environmental pressures. At its best, planning coordinates land use with transport, housing, biodiversity, and climate resilience. In this way, planners work not only to manage growth but to guide it toward outcomes that benefit both communities and the environment.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Sinn Fein housing spokesman, Eoin O'Broin discusses his parliamentary question about the numbers of extra planning staff hired over the last two years by local authorities
We hear the term used a lot on the radio and in the news but what do planners actually do on a day to day basis? Generally, planning has two functions, development management and forward planning. Development management is where the vast majority of planners work in Ireland. When you apply for a house extension or a new office building or to change the façade of a supermarket, the planning team in a local authority assess the development, look at policy and make a decision to allow you to build it or not.
The second area that planners work on is called forward planning, this is making plans for our future. Each local authority in Ireland reviews national policy, makes a development plan aligned to this for their area and develops detailed plans for a particular town, street or area called masterplans, LAPS (local area plans), SDZs (strategic development zones) or UDZs (urban development zones).
That mission is becoming increasingly urgent. As Ireland’s population grows (projected to reach over six million by 2051), pressure is mounting to deliver compact, well-connected, low-carbon development in existing urban areas. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change — from flooding and sea level rise to extreme heat and water stress — demand that we radically rethink how we design settlements, locate infrastructure and manage land use.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, do we need to reform the planning system?
Now here is the interesting part, in recent years we are now seeing much more emphasis on making or remaking new areas in towns and cities. This requires urban designers who think about what kind of place this will be. Are there transport links? How do we deal with rainfall in climate change events? What kind of population density is the correct one?
Ireland’s shortage of planners is well documented. Many councils are unable to fill key posts in forward planning and development management, often losing staff to the private sector or to jurisdictions abroad that offer better pay and working conditions. We're seeing more or less the same numbers of planners, urban designers and related professionals graduating from third-level as was the case in the past, but the two main areas of planning have substantially grown in recent years and will continue to grow.
This means we are slowly running out of planners to fill those positions, which is bad news for everyone. Without highly skilled trained planners and urban designers, we leave plan making to the market, and this is not a balanced view. Under a development plan, a site usually has a very broad zoning with lots of potential uses, particularly in urban centres.
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From RTÉ Archives, Tony Connelly repoorts for RTÉ News in 2001 on how a shortage of planners and a lack of regulation enforcement has led to chaos in the Irish planning system
The better way to do things is to carefully make plans for our cities and towns, imagining what they look and feel like as places. For instance we could think of a new urban district which has a square as its heart surrounded by hotels, cinemas, bars and restaurants that is the centre of a mixed use community. If we plan this way and work out what we want that to look like, from building heights to pedestrianised streets we can extrapolate the areas, programmes and heights of each urban block and even of what each building should be.
This way of doing things isn’t new and it is how the best cities in the world think. This is the planning system we all want. Planners want it as it creates great places and developers and investors want it as it creates certainty, but it requires one much needed asset, and that is the time of skilled people who are trained to think about how to make future plans. This is something we are incredibly short on.
What we need in Ireland now is a new generation of well trained, urban designers who can think about public space, beautiful buildings, a climate changing world, economics and density parameters in a holistic way to shape our towns and villages. We hear many stories about the shortage of housing and it has become a discussion on numbers, much like a commodity. But if we only build numbers, what kind of society are we designing? We need a balanced approach where the placemaking is as important as the numbers so we have a society that functions well into the long term.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
