Fitness Classes for children in homelessness see increased attendance
Clip • 5 Mins • 28 MAY • Morning Ireland
Sheila Naughton reports from a Little Fitness class for children in homelessness.
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RTÉ News
2 days ago
- RTÉ News
What a shortage of planners in Ireland means for where you live
Analysis: Planners work to manage growth and guide it towards outcomes to benefit both communities and the environment Most people don't realise how much of their daily environment, including parks, housing, transport and flood defences depends on urban planners and designers. And right now, Ireland is facing a chronic shortage of both, especially in local authorities. Good planning isn't just reactive; it's proactive and people-focused. It's about how towns and cities can become more liveable, equitable and resilient in the face of growing social and environmental pressures. At its best, planning coordinates land use with transport, housing, biodiversity, and climate resilience. In this way, planners work not only to manage growth but to guide it toward outcomes that benefit both communities and the environment. From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Sinn Fein housing spokesman, Eoin O'Broin discusses his parliamentary question about the numbers of extra planning staff hired over the last two years by local authorities We hear the term used a lot on the radio and in the news but what do planners actually do on a day to day basis? Generally, planning has two functions, development management and forward planning. Development management is where the vast majority of planners work in Ireland. When you apply for a house extension or a new office building or to change the façade of a supermarket, the planning team in a local authority assess the development, look at policy and make a decision to allow you to build it or not. The second area that planners work on is called forward planning, this is making plans for our future. Each local authority in Ireland reviews national policy, makes a development plan aligned to this for their area and develops detailed plans for a particular town, street or area called masterplans, LAPS (local area plans), SDZs (strategic development zones) or UDZs (urban development zones). That mission is becoming increasingly urgent. As Ireland's population grows (projected to reach over six million by 2051), pressure is mounting to deliver compact, well-connected, low-carbon development in existing urban areas. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change — from flooding and sea level rise to extreme heat and water stress — demand that we radically rethink how we design settlements, locate infrastructure and manage land use. From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, do we need to reform the planning system? Now here is the interesting part, in recent years we are now seeing much more emphasis on making or remaking new areas in towns and cities. This requires urban designers who think about what kind of place this will be. Are there transport links? How do we deal with rainfall in climate change events? What kind of population density is the correct one? Ireland's shortage of planners is well documented. Many councils are unable to fill key posts in forward planning and development management, often losing staff to the private sector or to jurisdictions abroad that offer better pay and working conditions. We're seeing more or less the same numbers of planners, urban designers and related professionals graduating from third-level as was the case in the past, but the two main areas of planning have substantially grown in recent years and will continue to grow. This means we are slowly running out of planners to fill those positions, which is bad news for everyone. Without highly skilled trained planners and urban designers, we leave plan making to the market, and this is not a balanced view. Under a development plan, a site usually has a very broad zoning with lots of potential uses, particularly in urban centres. The better way to do things is to carefully make plans for our cities and towns, imagining what they look and feel like as places. For instance we could think of a new urban district which has a square as its heart surrounded by hotels, cinemas, bars and restaurants that is the centre of a mixed use community. If we plan this way and work out what we want that to look like, from building heights to pedestrianised streets we can extrapolate the areas, programmes and heights of each urban block and even of what each building should be. This way of doing things isn't new and it is how the best cities in the world think. This is the planning system we all want. Planners want it as it creates great places and developers and investors want it as it creates certainty, but it requires one much needed asset, and that is the time of skilled people who are trained to think about how to make future plans. This is something we are incredibly short on. What we need in Ireland now is a new generation of well trained, urban designers who can think about public space, beautiful buildings, a climate changing world, economics and density parameters in a holistic way to shape our towns and villages. We hear many stories about the shortage of housing and it has become a discussion on numbers, much like a commodity. But if we only build numbers, what kind of society are we designing? We need a balanced approach where the placemaking is as important as the numbers so we have a society that functions well into the long term.
RTÉ News
3 days ago
- RTÉ News
Level of misinformation around Carlow shooting 'shocking'
Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said the level of misinformation that emerged following a shooting in Carlow town on Sunday was "shocking". 22-year-old Evan Fitzgerald fired a shotgun into the air a number of times at Fairgreen Shopping Centre, before he died from a self-inflicted wound. Nobody was injured by the shots fired. A young girl in the shopping centre with her parents sustained a minor leg injury when she fell while running from the scene. The Taoiseach said the level of misinformation that emerged on social media platforms in the immediate aftermath of the incident was "quite shocking". Mr Martin said he saw some social media posts saying seven people had been killed in the incident. "There is a family in mourning right now, but the level of misinformation on Sunday was quite shocking, and we can't just ignore that and say, well, we don't have to do anything about that," he said. Mr Martin was responding to a question about the impact of potential misinformation regulations on freedom of speech. The Taoiseach said: "Obviously, in any analysis and evaluation of policy, account will be taken in respect to protecting freedom of speech, but it's not freedom of speech really, when it's just a blatant lie and untruth which can create a lot of public disquiet, as we have seen." He said these issues do need to be addressed. Mr Martin said: "There are very strong protections in our Constitution and in our laws on freedom of speech, so I wouldn't overstate the impact on clamping down on blatant lies online as a sort of incursion or an undermining of freedom of speech." He added: "We believe in freedom of speech in this country. We will always support it, protect it to the best possible." Senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue Ciarán O'Connor said that as soon as word emerged of the incident in Carlow, rumours and claims began to surface online "making stunningly definitive but wholly inaccurate statements." He told RTÉ's Morning Ireland: "One of the most notable ones claimed that seven people including a child had been shot. "That post was published on X and has over 360,000 views. It hasn't been taken down, no kind of action identifying it as a false or misleading claim on the platform itself."
RTÉ News
4 days ago
- RTÉ News
Shortage of planning staff causing housing delays
Sinn Féin's housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said a shortage of planning staff both in councils and in An Bord Pleanála is causing an excessive delay in building houses. Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said the Government has stated that the goal is to have 120 planners graduate each year, but it is not clear how this will be achieved in the Government's housing plan. He said that the Government has its "head in the sand" and is ignoring advice from the professionals. "Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael repeatedly have been told by the utilities, by professional planners, by people involved in public and private sector residential development what is required to get to the level of social affordable and private home ownership, new build homes that's required," he said. "We need a workplace plan from the Government and centralised planners are not necessary as decisions are best made locally", he added. He said that three years ago, the Government asked the City and County Managers' Association, the body that represents local authority managers, to do an assessment of how many additional planning staff they needed to meet the planning requirements at that time. Mr Ó Broin said the report, which was given to the department in 2022, said that local authorities needed an additional 541 planning staff. However, he said the parliamentary question that he got back from the minister last week stated that the Government provided sanction for 213 of those staff, but only 86 of those have been employed. "So less than half what was required has been sanctioned, and less than half of that again has been employed. And in my dealings with local authorities they're telling us all the time, both in their housing departments and in their planning departments, they have a problem with retention," Eoin Ó Broin said. "They don't have enough staff and there really doesn't seem to be any coherent plan from Government to address this," he said. "And the direct consequence is it is taking far, far too long, both for local authorities and An Bord Pleanála, who also have a staffing deficit, to make crucial decisions, decisions on underlying critical infrastructure, housing and renewable energy projects," he stressed. "We're not training up sufficient planners. We're also not able to keep all the planners that we're training and we're not making it as easy as we should do for people who might be, say, engineers in local authorities or related professions who want to scale up on the job and move across into planning," the Sinn Féin TD said. He also criticised the Government's "so-called resources plan" saying it does not say how many planners the country has, or how many it needs. "They say they want to get to 120 a year but they don't say how we're going to get to that number," he said. "I've met with the Irish Planning Institute, I meet with public and private sector professional planners and they've been shouting about this for a very, very long time," he stated. He said the Government can not plan for investment in water infrastructure or the electricity grid. "They haven't invested in a plan to ensure we have an adequate number of planners, both in the public and private sector side. And that's one of the single biggest reasons why planning decisions and planning decisions on housing are being delayed," he said. "We're about to have a revised national development plan and revised set of housing targets," he said. "If there isn't an adequate workforce plan to set out from 2025 to 2030, how many additional planners we're going to recruit each year, then the Government is not going to meet its housing targets, its critical infrastructure targets its renewable energy targets and of course that will make working people's lives ever more difficult," he concluded.
