One Serial Objector has Held up Billions Worth of Public and Private Infrastructure Projects in Ireland

Irelands planning system must be decisively overhauled

Ireland has many rare species: the corncrake, the bog orchid, and the small farmer who doesn’t take EU subsidies. But none are quite as destructive as the serial planning objector—that peculiar Irish man who thinks progress is a contagious disease and his life’s mission is to end it.

These are the people who look at half a million Dubliners in rental purgatory and conclude the real menace facing society is… too many balconies. Apartments are bad for “heritage” (heritage, in this case, meaning the listed monument otherwise known as their driveway). Try to build a road, and suddenly they care deeply about a protected species of moss growing on a ditch. Propose renewable energy, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re overnight experts in migratory bird trauma. The fact that most of these folks couldn’t tell a kestrel from a kettle is neither here nor there. This isn’t activism; it’s anti-development vandalism cloaked in virtue-signalling. Ireland spends billions stuck in planning limbo because one bloke in a village in West Cork decided that a housing estate in Dublin offends his sensibilities. The serial objectors sip their lattes knowing full well their complaints carry more weight than the entire Irish housing crisis combined.

The problem is not that people raise legitimate concerns. It’s that one determined person with a printer, envelopes, and too much free time can hold up multi-million euro projects for years at a stretch. Roads, rail, cycling greenways, hospitals, housing estates—all stalled, sometimes killed stone dead. This isn’t engaged citizenship, it’s sabotage dressed as civic duty. When objecting becomes a hobby, Ireland gets fewer homes, longer commutes, and crumbling infrastructure.

Worse still, the planning system indulges these people like a pub that never calls time. Every submission is treated with equal solemnity, whether from a professional conservation group or “Declan in Dalkey”, who simply doesn’t like the look of apartment balconies. Thus billions in delayed investment, perpetually rising house prices, and national climate targets left in tatters—all at the whim of the same chronic nay-sayers.

Ireland’s planning laws need to change because they’re designed for a country with too much building, not too little. We fetishise “consultation” to the point of paralysis. What’s required is a system that aggressively distinguishes between objections grounded in fact and those grounded in crankery and self-interest. If you can’t show evidence that your complaint materially affects the environment or local community, it shouldn’t weigh down the progress of vital infrastructure.

Put bluntly, it shouldn't be easier to stop a hospital being built than to build one. Yet in Ireland, the serial objector has been elevated to folk hero status in some circles, when in reality they’re every bit as parasitic to national progress as the politicians who shrug and tell us they’re powerless to do anything about it. The planning system is supposed to serve the greater good, not the greater whinge. Change the laws, cut the nonsense, and build the damn infrastructure.