Retention is Irish planning’s second chance: permission sought for what already exists, decided on the same test as any application. It cures thousands of files — and it is not a formality: the works being built earns no discount, the application itself concedes the breach, and one class of development it cannot cure at all. This page is the honest map.
The Same Test — and the Honest Success Conditions
Retention succeeds where the underlying development would have succeeded: consistent with the development plan, acceptable in amenity terms, serviceable and safe — the classic domestic extension, the garden structure over threshold, the modest commercial change. It struggles where a fresh application would have struggled — material contraventions, genuine neighbour amenity damage, deficient access — and lodging it for those buys publicity and a refusal that hardens the enforcement file: the application runs the full normal machinery, site notice describing the retention sought, public file, five-week submissions from any party, appeal rights to An Coimisiún Pleanála. Which is why the assessment here happens before anything is filed, in a planner’s terms: would this have been granted? And one alternative is always checked first: where a genuine Section 5 exemption argument exists, the declaration route resolves the matter without conceding any breach at all — an argument the retention application surrenders the day it’s lodged, because applying for retention declares the works unauthorised. Section 5 first, retention second, is often the whole strategy.
The Limits and the Races: EIA, Enforcement, the Sale
The EIA limit: European law forbids the after-the-fact shortcut — development that required environmental impact assessment or Habitats screening cannot be regularised by ordinary retention, the law having been reshaped to close that route and provide instead the narrow, exceptional substitute consent procedure with its own gateway tests. Domestic extensions never meet this wall; quarries, intensified agricultural operations, larger works and anything near European sites can find it’s the whole ballgame — and knowing which world your development sits in is the first question, not the last. The enforcement race: a retention application doesn’t suspend an enforcement notice — compliance clocks keep running — but a credible application changes the practical conversation, with held escalation and negotiated compliance the everyday outcomes; the sequencing choreography (respond and test the notice first, or lodge first, or Section 5 instead) is case-specific and decisive. The sale: a grant regularises the title — requisitions answered, the price chip gone; a refusal creates a public record every future purchaser’s solicitor will find. Retention is a genuine cure with real conditions — and when the realistic answer is refusal, this practice says so before the application creates the record.
Something Built That the Paperwork Doesn't Cover?
Before anything is lodged - Section 5 or retention, and in which order - the merits get assessed as a planner would assess them. Send photographs, dates and any correspondence today.
Call 01 5827148