At council meeting, amendment highlights messy politics around planning exemptions for asylum shelters

At a special council meeting, on the evening of 23 September, independent Councillor Gavin Pepper pitched a motion.

His proposal called on the government to “withdraw all planning exemptions” for asylum shelters. 

Pepper said this wasn’t just an objection to the flaws of the planning exemption scheme, but to immigration in general.

“Contracts are signed in secret and buildings are repurposed without consultation,” he said.

His motion also requests that a “community engagement team” talks to area residents before the government signs any new contract for an asylum shelter.

Another council had passed a similar motion, Pepper said, urging his colleagues to support his proposal. Fellow independent Councillor Malachy Steenson seconded it.

Shortly after, someone told Fine Gael Lord Mayor Ray McAdam that an amendment to the motion was on its way. 

The amendment, signed by independent Councillor Cieran Perry, People Before Profit’s Conor Reddy, the Social Democrats’ Jesslyn Henry and Sinn Féin’s Daithí Doolan and Janice Boylan, called on the government to “withdraw all planning exemptions” and ensure that every application travels through the full planning application process. 

“Also to request that the Community Engagement Team communicate with communities prior to signing of contracts for International Protection accommodation which will allow for full community engagement,” it says.

The amendment was narrowly defeated, in a 28 –21 vote, with Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Green Party and Labour Party councillors – and also Pepper and Steenson – voting against it. 

For some who supported the amendment, it was a way to distance themselves from the anti-immigrant message latent in Pepper’s pitch, while voicing objections of their own to the current planning-exemption scheme for asylum shelters, they say.

There was then a vote on Pepper’s original motion, which went down 47–2, with only Pepper and Steenson voting in favour.

The reality of now 

At the moment, landlords can get around putting in a full planning application to change the use of a building into an asylum shelter – which, in recent years, was needed with more urgency to stop people from sleeping rough. 

Instead, they can apply to the council for an exemption, a much quicker, cheaper route. Still, the government has to approve these buildings as suitable. 

But people can apply for planning exemptions for all kinds of things, not just asylum shelters.

Things like building an extension to a house, raising a TV antenna, or growing a greenhouse. The list runs to about 90 pages.

This is meant to make life easier, both for the council by freeing up its workload and for homeowners to finish up small projects without navigating much bureaucracy.  

These applications for a so-called “section five” exemption declaration are visible through the same public website that regular planning applications are – but they can be a bit harder to spot than regular planning applications.

Also, unlike with the regular planning process, there’s no need to post a notice on a building to explain its planned future or place an advertisement in a newspaper about it. 

Local residents or representatives don’t get to submit their views to the council about these proposals either. 

The caveat is that if a building was, say, an old warehouse, even if it was greenlit for reuse as an asylum shelter, its owners still had to navigate mainstream planning routes to do the construction to revamp it and make it livable. 

Public representatives and community activists from across the political spectrum have criticised the way the government tells local communities – or doesn’t – about its plans to open new asylum shelters in their neighbourhoods.

What is going on? 

Now, back to the council meeting on the evening of 23 September.

Jose, the Green Party councillor, was abroad for a conference and half-watching the meeting online when the amendment cropped up, he says.

It jumped him into focus when he twigged that the amendment was asking to drop all planning exemptions, said Jose, sitting outside a city café, recently.

“Like we’re trying to get planning exemptions for things like bike sheds outside people’s houses, which I think a lot of councillors who voted for this have called for,” he said.

Darragh Moriarty, a Labour Party councillor, says he’s still “perplexed” by the proposal. 

“The amendment was just so vast and sweeping, it beggars belief,” said Moriarty by phone, recently.

Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, says he supported the amendment, but he’s not in favour of scrapping planning exemptions for necessities of city and community life, like solar panels and street works.  

Moriarty points to how some councillors did say similar that night, “but that’s not what their amendment said, it said all exemptions”, he says.

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn says his issue with exemptions for asylum shelters is about lack of transparency. Perry says he shares the same concerns for “all planning applications”.

Flynn says he agrees that the amendment wasn’t thought through, but it highlights the challenge of responding to inflammatory spins on motions that councillors generally agree with.  

“It was a little bit ill-informed, but they were in a rush to, you know, counterbalance Mr Pepper,” he said.

In response to an interview request, Pepper sent a link to a news story about councillors in Co. Laois objecting to current planning policies for asylum centres and didn’t respond any further.

Ch-ch-changes

At the meeting, a council manager noted that the government had recently invited the public to voice their views on reform of the planning exemption regime. 

The Department of Housing held a public consultation about it between 29 July and 26 August of this year. 

Among its proposed changes are that “attic conversions are allowed”, and “to exempt a detached habitable accommodation unit to the rear of a dwelling within its curtilage”.

Perry, the independent councillor, says that neither the amendment nor Pepper’s motion at the 23 September meeting, which he called a "publicity stunt” to generate social media content, would have been binding, anyway. 

“The planning process is set by primary legislation and would be unaffected by a motion from the members of a local authority,” he said. 

For Jose, though, that’s irrelevant. “Just because it’s never going to happen doesn’t mean that you write to the Minister asking for it to happen, signed on behalf of every single councillor,” he said.

He says doing away with all the exemptions would have profound consequences, making life harder for both the council and Dubliners.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Local Government did not respond to queries sent on 30 September, including one asking how it would have reacted to such a proposal. 

Earlier in September, John Cummins, a Fine Gael TD, and Minister of State for Local Government and Planning at the Department of Housing, told the Dáil that it was reviewing over 900 submissions filed by the public in response to a call-out about refreshing planning exemptions. 

The new planning law, the Planning and Development Act 2024, will introduce an updated exempted development list, he said.

While one part of the law is slated to kick in by the end of this year, Cummins said, certain facets of the exempted development list will be processed faster “for advance inclusion in the current regulations and will also be carried forward” into the new law.

Cummins was responding to queries from a few TDs. Aontú TD Paul Lawless had specifically asked him about planning exemptions for asylum shelters. 

Degrees of disagreement 

Moriarty, the Labour councillor, said he was not shocked to see Sinn Féin councillors vote for the amendment.

Sinn Féin’s policy on asylum shelters calls for community consultation and removing their planning exemption.

It says they should not be in deprived areas, or neighbourhoods with stretched resources – like GPs and school places.

In the council meeting, Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, signed the amendment to call on the government to end all planning exemptions and said, “I support the amendment 100 percent.” 

He said the planning process should be “transparent” and “democratic”. 

“We oppose any form of undermining of the planning process,” Doolan said.

Moriarty says he was surprised to see the Social Democrats and People Before Profit backing the amendment, though. 

Councillors should have debated Pepper on his original motion and the polarising way he framed it, Moriarty says, instead of weaving around it and dreaming up a broad amendment that, like Pepper’s, called for “consultation” for opening asylum shelters.

“People bring forward motions all the time; you either agree or disagree with them. You don’t need to come up with a counter amendment that makes things worse,” he said.

Several Social Democrats councillors and the party’s press office did not respond to queries sent last week, including one asking their reasons for supporting the amendment.

Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, says he endorsed it because “the planning system is in need of major reform to make it more democratic and accessible to people without great resources or specialist knowledge”.

When in need 

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice’s International Protection Accommodation Services’ (IPAS) reliance on emergency shelters to save people seeking asylum from sleeping rough remains profound. 

Of the 324 asylum centres across the country, 269 of them are emergency shelters –  that’s 83 percent, official figures show.

These emergency centres are also exempt from independent inspections by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) into their operation. 

Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, the Minister for Justice, told the Dáil recently that over 90 percent of asylum centres are “commercially provided”.

The government has struggled to open shelters on its own land, facing opposition and in one case, a lawsuit in Thornton Hall in Fingal.

Joe Mooney, a community activist in East Wall and a member of Dublin Communities Against Racism (DCAR), says while it’s true that landlords still need a planning permission to make a prospective asylum shelter habitable, in reality, a request for a revamp with little transparency can flare up tensions in city neighbourhoods. 

He points to Basin View in Dublin 8, where a developer has abandoned work on a site to expand a small shelter there, but anti-immigrant protestors thought it was to open a brand new one, not realising asylum seekers were already their neighbours.

“It was a complete disaster because of lack of clarity around how the planning is done, and it gave the racists an opportunity to lie about what was happening,” he said.

Kieran Rose, a former council planner, says that if the change-of-use planning exemption for asylum shelters is lifted, planners should do their best to ignore any objection that’s “based on prejudice and xenophobia”.

Jose, the Green Party councillor, and Moriarty, the Labour councillor, say there’s still a need to offer beds to people seeking asylum urgently, otherwise they will be engulfed by homelessness. 

“It’s very clear there’s still a huge lack of availability. Unfortunately, that manifests itself in mostly single men living in tents,” said Morarity.

As fewer people have lodged asylum claims in recent months, the number of homeless men seeking asylum has fallen a little.

Still, on 6 October, 613 people were unaccommodated.