Developer Michael O'Flynn blames ‘prescriptive’ planning for impacting housing crisis
Michael O'Flynn, Chief Executive, O'Flynn Group
ONE of the country’s most prominent developers has called for collaboration and cooperation between the private and public sectors to address the deepening housing crisis, while saying planning laws and guidelines have become “more and more prescriptive, that’s giving more and more opportunity to the courts and that’s quite concerning - it’s become an industry all of its own.”
The comments, made by developer Michael O’Flynn and a member of the Housing Commission at a gathering of IPAV estate agents in Cork prior to this week’s announcement of changes to An Bord Pleanala and the planning process to be drafted into law next year.
The developer said estimates of housing need were grossly underestimated, based on the 2016 Census instead of the latest one with the country’s population set to go to 6.5 or 7 million by 2050.
Thus, the number of dwellings needed by mid century would be 3 to 3.5m, vs the 1.9m occupied dwellings at present, arguing we needed to produce between 42,000 and 62,000 homes of all tenure type a year.
Taking the number of refugees now in Ireland into account, the country was underestimating need by up to 450,000 homes, he stressed: “that is real, the facts are there.” Housing completions were now going in the wrong direction, he said at an IPAV industry gathering calling for action on planning, servicing land which is zoned and tackling costs and levies. “At a time of scarce resources, getting planning for something that can’t be built is of no benefit to anyone,” Mr O’Flynn stated, arguing that a certain level of profit was necessary for private developers to deliver and saying “you can’t build at a loss.”
“At this moment in time, we have some of the best developers in the country and planning consultants in the country and they are ending up in the courts every time they do something: there’s something wrong when experts end up in courts all of the time if they know what they are doing. It just means that the legalising of the planning system has gone totally out of hand,” he asserted.
Mr O’Flynn instanced the SHD process introduced several years ago for fast-tracking large scale developments: “that needed tweaking, it didn’t need to be thrown out. It’s really concerning we don’t have enough planners, we have all of the issues around An Bord Pleanala and even to get preplanning meetings at this moment in time, I don’t think people understand the difficulties we have.” Addressing funding for development, the Cork-based developer said international capital was necessary, but warned that investment funds were tiring of their public portrayal in Ireland.
“Without them we would not have had development in this country for a number of years. The name calling of them and how they are dealt with is quite extraordinary.
"When you look at FDI for example we roll out the carpet to people coming in with industry. People coming in with money we criticise,” he declared. ”I know some of them really well and they are tired of Ireland and they are tired of Ireland criticising and changing the rules as they call it during the game.”
“They are very serious criticisms because with the financial crisis and all that happened with that, we are dependent on international capital. We need to be respectful of it and we need to work with that capital. If we don’t we are really, really going down a slippery slope as regards the funding of our housing which is so critical for FDI,” Mr O’Flynn continued, saying the FDI situation was only now coming out and highlighting housing as an issue, noting his firm had had had direct experience of jobs going out of Ireland as “they were not convinced of the housing story in Ireland.”
“I chased the guy to know why, really they did not come to Ireland and he said ‘in one word, housing’. They had done their homework and they were absolutely right.”
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