Irish councils lack ability to plan big cities, conference told

Local authorities are not “in any position to drive positive planning for big cities”, a conference on sustainable urban regeneration in Dublin has been told.

The current planning system may be sufficient for rural Ireland but cities required a “radically different approach”, Senator Michael McDowell told the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and Academy of Urbanism conference.

“Beautiful cities, worthy of conservation, don’t happen by accident, we cannot have a system which governs their development that is fundamentally accidental in the way it works,” he said.

There was a “myth” that the Constitution was standing in the way of the proper development of cities, he said, noting that in his...
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