Mick Clifford: Midleton rezoning row highlights the weaknesses in Ireland's planning system
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Magdalena Persinska wants to come home to Midleton.
“I have been searching for sometime to buy a house near Midleton Town as I wish to move back to Midleton from Poland,” she wrote in a submission to Cork County Council. “I have been finding it extremely difficult to secure a new home for my family as there is nothing available to buy which came as a big shock.”
Magdalena has specifications for the type of home she wants. In her submission, she wrote:
Magdalena’s submission is one of 230 received by the council appealing to rezone a 24-acre parcel of land in Midleton in the forthcoming Cork County Development Plan. Various sources familiar with local government describe this volume of submissions in favour of a rezoning as “unprecedented” and “highly unusual”.
The public often engages in the planning system, usually to oppose, when permission is sought for a particular development. It is very rare that such engagement happens over a residential rezoning at the time of formulation of a five-year county development plan. The council has also received 140 submissions opposing the rezoning.
The row over the proposed rezoning at Broomfield on the outskirts of the town goes to the heart of issues around planning and the housing crisis.
The site is earmarked to provide 270 homes, mostly semi-detached houses. Those who are opposed claim that the site is wholly unsuitable and that such a development will have a major negative impact on traffic volumes in particular in the locale, despite the close proximity to a train station.
The developer, Tim Murray of Castle Rock Homes, says there is a campaign afoot to block the rezoning, based on nothing more than “Nimbyism”, a term used to describe opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area. ‘Nimby’ is an acronym for ‘not in my back yard’. Mr Murray asks:
He cites one resident in the adjoining housing estate which Castle Rock built a few years ago.
“This woman who made a submission opposed to the rezoning was in there for five or six months and she was saying no more houses should be built, that the traffic was awful, it was a nightmare to get to school and back in the morning.
“We videoed the [school] run. It was 11 minutes. A couple of mornings it was up to 15 minutes, yet she said the traffic was terrible.”
Mr Murray’s company also issued legal correspondence to the local residents’ association, claiming that the company had been libelled in a Whatsapp group.
“I’m a director of the company which I have a responsibility to protect,” he says. “That person wrote stuff that was lies and defamatory. I believe she was misled into writing it. She is not a native English speaker.”
Those who oppose the rezoning include local resident and Green Party councillor Liam Quaide: “It’s obvious from talking to councillor colleagues that there has been a strong lobbying push to overturn the greenbelt rezoning of the large Broomfield site,” he says.
“Broomfield was historically meant to have town centre components but this land was later zoned for residential use. What we are now left with is a series of housing estates without green spaces, play areas, cafes, or other social amenities.”
In a circular issued by Castle Rock about the proposed rezoning, Mr Quaide was referenced: “Green councillor who lives in Broomfield cited biggest concern as ‘traffic congestion’. (he has two cars and lives 5 minutes walk from the train station).”
The circular also referenced comments made by a Sinn Féin councillor — but the rezoning is opposed by most councillors in the area, including one of the two Fine Gael members.
What sets this rezoning apart is the huge volume of input from the public.
The initial vote last summer was to overturn the green belt zoning. This was reversed in December when a large majority of councillors on Cork County Council voted to revert to greenbelt. Then, in the public consultation phase up until the end of February, the submissions flowed in.
The large volume of submissions favouring the greenbelt was unusual as, ordinarily, the vote in December would have suggested this was a done deal anyway.
However, Liam Quaide says he made people aware of the possibility that the greenbelt status could be lost due to major lobbying by the developer.
“I did go around to people and make them aware of what was happening,” he says.
“I’ve been very public about this throughout and there was a template submission on literature I handed out. I think it’s the duty of a public rep to make people aware. This [lobbying by the developer] was driven by commercial interests as opposed to the interests of the community.
“That’s a very different story to local residents whose quality of life will be directly impacted making a decision.”
If such a volume submitting in favour of retaining greenbelt was unusual, then the volume submitting to rezone the land as residential was unprecedented.
The housing crisis, on the face of it, could be responsible for such a high degree of engagement. However, if those desperately seeking a home were moved to make their voices heard, it would usually be when homes are actually being built, rather than at the zoning stage. For instance, there are plans in place for nearly 800 homes to be built in the Midleton area, yet it is this rezoning that has attracted by far the most engagement.
There are some interesting features in the submissions. A number cite a Business Post article published in January under the headline “No Increase In Number Of New Build Homes To Purchase In 2022”.
One of these was made by a James Kelleher whose address, like all others, was redacted.
“As a person playing exorbitant rent and desperate to get on the property ladder can you begin to imagine how desperate we are? Please note our horror at your decision not to allow the construction of houses in Broomfield Midleton.”
This submission, that of Ms Persinska, and a number of others all coincidentally quoted the wrong amendment reference number for the site in question. The correct reference is 4.3.3.15 but the number quoted was 4.3.15.
Another feature of many of the submissions is that they are addressed to “the secretary” of the planning department, yet such an office is not mentioned in the literature available to inform the public how to make a submission.
Most of the submissions are from prospective first-time buyers, but at least one is from a downsizer.
Two people named Anne Sweeney made submissions, one against rezoning, one in favour of it.
In her submission dated February 11, Mrs Anne Sweeney wrote: “I have been looking for a while now to downsize from my current home and buy in the Midleton area. I would love an opportunity to buy a newly built 2-bedroom house where I can walk to town, shops and meet friends to socialise.”
In conversation with the , Tim Murray mentioned that some of the homes in the development he would like to build on the site would be suitable for downsizers.
The other unusual feature of the submissions favouring the residential rezoning is that the vast majority were hand delivered to Cork County Council rather than provided online. A spokeswoman for the council said the Planning Acts encourage as many submissions as possible from a wide range of groups and individuals.
“It would not be possible to check the validity of each submission received,” she said. “If a specific issue is raised in writing about a specific submission then it is considered by the council.”
Mr Murray says he had nothing to do with the submissions that were made favouring the rezoning he is seeking.
“I didn’t organise anything,” he says. “We have 200 people on a waiting list to buy a house in Broomfield. Anybody who rang us, we told them about the campaign to stop this. I made a submission myself.”
The council executive, including the planning department, has recommended the rezoning but ultimately it is in the hands of the elected members of Cork County Council.
In that respect, the parcel of land in Midleton is the perfect illustration of one shortcoming in the system of local government.
All 55 members get to vote on the issue, irrespective of how far removed they are from the East Cork town.
For instance, a councillor who might live at the extremity of the western Beara peninsula has the same vote on a zoning located at the eastern tip of the county as would the local representative in that area. In this respect, councillors are, to a large extent, not answerable to the voters.
Independent councillor for the Carrigaline area, Marcia Dalton, says that the system always struck her as highly inappropriate.
“I would find myself voting on areas that I know nothing about,” she says.
“In a party structure, you would assume that the party would sit down with those in the area in question and inform colleagues, but nothing beats living in an area so we know what’s good for a place and what isn’t, what to fear and what not to fear.
"I don’t know Castletownbere as I do Passage West, where I live.”
Last December, in voting to return the Broomfield site to greenbelt, the council voted 31 in favour, 17 against with four abstentions.
The East Cork area has seven councillors, Liam Quaide (Green), Danielle Twomey (SF), Susan McCarthy (FG), Michael Hegarty (FG), Mary Linehan-Foley (Ind),Noel Collins (Ind) andAnn-Marie Ahern (FF).
The motion to zone the land as greenbelt was proposed by Sinn Féin’s Danielle Twomey and seconded by Fine Gael’s Susan McCarthy. Of the six who represent the area, only one, Fine Gael’s Michael Hegarty, voted against the green belt zoning. He has been on Cork County Council since 1985. Mr Hegarty describes himself as “pro-development”.
When asked whether in his long experience he had even seen such a volume of submissions from the public on a rezoning, he said that things have changed.
“It’s a different process [today], totally different,” he says. “It is quite a substantial number. I suppose people didn’t take too much interest prior to this on what’s happening in a village or town but I have to say there are people crying out for it.
“I would say there was a campaign orchestrated to be anti it, and that drove it as regards the submissions in favour.”
He says he has not been contacted by Mr Murray.
“I wouldn’t know him nor the sky above him,” Mr Hegarty says. “I was contacted by his agent.”
The last entry on the lobbying register for Castle Rock Homes dates from August 2017, but Tim Murray told the he has been meeting councillors on this issue and will be registering his lobbying next month as per regulations. He says that the opposition to his plans is as a result of a campaign by “five or six people” who, he claims, are spreading misinformation.
Danielle Twomey, the councillor who proposed the green belt status last December, says that she has yet to “meet one member of the community that is in favour of this site being zoned residential”.
“We should not be piling houses on top of houses in the wrong area and at the detriment of the residents currently living there,” she says.
The crucial vote on the matter is scheduled for April 25. This will be preceded by a private meeting, from which the press and public are excluded, on April 14. Tim Murray says he is “hopeful rather than confident” that the considerable vote against his rezoning last December will be overturned.
“It will be one or two votes each way,” he says. “The councillors in Midleton will have to account to the people if there are not new houses built in the town for the next couple of years.”