Planning permission equals more bob for the builders.

You would have thought that with over 300,000 homes lying empty in Ireland (not including nearly 50,000 holiday homes), according to a study by the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis, the last thing you would want to do is build even more empty dwellings, right?

It hasn’t stopped Shelbourne Development putting in a planning application for 11,500 homes only up the road from the moribund Adamstown mega-development. Similarly, Capel Developments has applied for planning permission to build 260 dwellings in Ashtown.

Now, I pass the apartments at Ashtown every day on the train. The once-bustling sales office is boarded up and covered in graffiti, and when you go by at night the number of darkened windows is a tell-tale sign of how many of them are lying empty. So why the hell would a developer want to build any more?

Mark Keenan, writing in the Sunday Times, offers the only plausible explanation. It seems that having land approved for planning permission, even in today’s climate, can increase its value by between 10% and 15% in outer Dublin, and up to 40% in areas such as Dublin 4. So, given the perilous financial state of many developers, getting their land planning-permission approved is the obvious way to perfume the balance sheet before the banks come sniffing round, post-Nama valuations.

Taking into account that any putative development should be considered against the background of sustainability, and given the fact that Dublin is already blighted by ghost estates, you might think that the only possible response of a properly functioning local authority would be to refuse any further requests for planning permission. Unless they accept it is simply a ruse and they know nothing is actually going to be built, at least not in the short or medium term.

But that would hardly be ethical, would it?

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