Michael Clifford: Are Sisters (and developers) doing it for themselves with rezoning demands? 

Developer Jim Kennedy, director of Jackson Way Properties, which is reported to be objecting to the county development plan for Dun Laoighaire/Rathdown on the basis that it is not doing enough for the people of the area. File picture: Collins Courts

Some people can’t do enough for the welfare of the country. Take an old stalwart of the property game, Jim Kennedy, who popped up again recently. Mr Kennedy and his wife Antoinette are directors of Jackson Way Properties, which owns tracts of lands in south Dublin. Last week it was reported that Jackson Way is objecting to the county development plan for Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown on the basis that it is not doing enough for the people of the area.

The plan, a submission for JW states, “does not provide sufficient employment-zoned lands to address the planned requirements of the county”. The company wants the council to rezone 26.77 hectares near the M50 for a hospital campus, a hotel, and employment enterprises. Most of this land is currently zoned for agriculture and rural amenity.

Mr Kennedy’s company is pointing out that the public servants don’t know what they’re doing. Instead, they argue the county should pay heed to the JW submission, which would hugely inflate the value of the lands in question, which happen to be owned by JW.

This is standard fare in submissions by landowners to have their holdings rezoned. They point out the public good to be wrought from transforming their muck into gold overnight. 

They buy land zoned agricultural and set about getting it rezoned which usually sees the value increase exponentially. Rezoning land is a system designed to provide for the needs of society, the public, the future development of the State. Then along come these landowners whose interests, their submissions infer, are in confluence with the needs of society, the public, the future development of State.

Jackson Way is just one of a whole raft of landowners and developers who are currently falling over themselves to show Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown council where they have gone wrong and why hundreds of acres should be rezoned, hugely inflating land values in the process. Interestingly, those in the mix also include religious orders and even a state agency, according to a report in The Irish Times.

The religious orders are objecting to a plan to dezone land owned by orders, which was previously zoned residential, in order to maintain sufficient green space in the council area. Among those objecting to this is the Congregation of Dominican Sisters, who claims such a plan was “unacceptable”. 

“There are 4,500 people on the housing list in this area — how can it be just or reasonable to prevent housing development on any available land,” the submission states. So the sisters believe that they are more concerned about the housing list than are the public servants, and it’s just a coincidence that if their prayers are answered in this respect the value of their land will be greatly enhanced.

Dezoning

Then we have the Central Bank of Ireland, the entity that, among other duties, determines how much a person may be permitted to spend on buying a home, vis a vis their income. The bank has land in Sandyford that has long been zoned for housing but no houses have ever been built on it. Now the bank fears that the council intends to dezone it.

“The lands are particularly suitable for residential use and assist (the council) in achieving a number of objectives set out in the national and regional strategies,”  the bank has submitted to the council. 

Or, to put it another way, we want the residential zoning maintained because the land will be worth far more to us.

This is how planning has been conducted for nigh on 60 years. The amounts of money at stake are huge, often collectively running into the hundreds of millions of euro. In the past, this has led to widespread corruption and played a major role in determining where successive generations would work and live, particularly in the greater Dublin area.

Then and now, most of the lobbying is perfectly legal. But the whole system is designed to place the interests of landowners above those of the vast majority of the public who just want to put a roof over their heads. 

The manner in which land is rezoned has contributed hugely to the unaffordability of housing that is now one of the biggest social, economic, and political issues in the State.

Land is viewed not as a means to providing housing, but a commodity to be used, to be gambled on, to accumulate wealth, all through manipulating society’s requirements.

 The sheer madness of the system was first pointed out by High Court judge John Kenny in 1973 in a seminal report on land values, yet it has persisted down through the decades, all the way to today’s housing crisis.

But back to Mr Kennedy, the director of Jackson Way. Mr Kennedy was once a focus of interest for the Planning Tribunal that sat in Dublin Castle for 14 years. The tribunal badly wanted to talk to him but he was beyond its reach in the Isle of Man.

When he did show up in Dublin a few years later, he was arrested by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). Mr Kennedy was subsequently charged with corruption, but the trial against him and others collapsed due to the ill health of the main prosecution witness, Frank Dunlop. CAB also brought a High Court action to get its hands on €12m which Jackson Way had been awarded because the agency believed the money was the proceeds of crime. CAB eventually dropped the action. Mr Kennedy is entirely innocent of any planning-related corruption in the eyes of the law.

And the company of which he is a director is once again actively taking an interest in land in the capital, pointing out how rezoning the company’s land will make the world a better place. Good luck to him. The system, after all, is designed to greatly enrich landowners who have a facility to speculate and gamble, and who would look such a gift horse in the mouth?