Neighbour's Annoying New Extension

Hi All:-

A friend of mine lives in a cottage in Rialto, Dublin. All the cottages are single storey, most with small flat-roofed extensions.

Last weekend, over the space of 72 hours, an extension went up on the house immediately behind theirs, with a pitched roof, extending the full height of the house, and taking up the entirety of the yard space.

Now my friend can't see the sky from her bedroom (at the back of their house). She is not happy. She's checked, and they applied for no planning permission.

She wants to do things by the book and not provoke her neighbour. She has complained to the corporation, and they say that they'll take care of it.

I'm just wondering, however, what might happen, and what her best course of action is. I've seen a lot of threads here mention planning applications for retrospective retention... Is it possible that this guy is going to get away with this? Do the Corpo ever actually make people take things down? (I'm reading the new Frank McDonald book about Irish planning, so I'm fearing the worst!)

Your comments, as ever, are appreciated.

Maybe it was ?

ClubMan said:

Maybe it was ?

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Thanks for that ClubMan. Yes, I'm aware of those guidelines, but I find them somewhat confusing... In this case, yes, the extension is smaller than 40 m2, and yes, it's no higher than the house, but it falls down on this clause : "The extension should not reduce the open space at the back of the house to less than 25 square metres". Now, no inner city cottage is going to have a 25 m2 open space to start with! But I've heard anecdotally that a certain amount (proportion) of open space must be retained. Can anyone clarify this?

I'm pretty sure that the open space condition is quite strict, but each case would be taken on its merits. Having said that, the neighbours case might actually have some merit (we don't know the full situation), so it is important that your friend and her other neighbours make their point clearly and often (as individuals) to the area planner and the enforcement people. This gives the planners some anti-merits to balance off against whatever pitch the person with the extension will give. Mention other things like being overlooked, etc . . .

Also, there is a condition regarding minimum space between two houses which back on to each other. I can't remember the details, but it would be worth checking it out as they may well have breached that also. Bear in mind that in high density area some of these conditions may not be possible to enforce simply because of the restricted spaces involved.

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This has got me thinking with regards to the planning permission notices that people put in their front gardens. These are all well and good for notifying people who pass by the front of the house but in a scenario such as this a neighbour living behind the house seeking permission may never pass this sign. Is there an onus on the person seeking to build to inform the owners of all houses that look onto the extension.

PP notices must be posted on the site and in the newspaper - see :

You must give a public notice of your proposals before making an application. This must be done by placing a notice in a locally circulating newspaper (your local authority will have a list) and putting up a site notice that can be clearly read. You will find details of information that must be contained in the notices in the planning application form.

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Another thing which would be useful is the system (used in the UK) whereby the local council sends a letter to all properties within a certain distance of anywhere for which a planning application had been made.

Should be easy to automate these days with all the location-based IT systems around the place.

It's probably easier to automate in the UK where they use a postal code system that identifies blocks of houses grouped together (e.g. one postal code could identify all houses on a single terrace).