Our Patched Planning System is Re-traumatising Communities. It Needs to Stop.
Two recent decisions, in Cork and Donegal, point to a planning system that processes sites of profound grief as if they were empty fields. There is a better way.
– Carol Tallon, www.caroltallon.com
I have spent my multi-decade long career unapologetically pro-development. I believe in building. I believe in the power of the built environment to create homes and to transform communities. I am not walking any of that back.
But development without a deep understanding of place is not development, it is imposition. And right now, two Irish local authorities are imposing decisions on communities that are in the throes of grief, and in doing so, causing serious, measurable harm.
The first is Bessborough. In February, Cork City Council granted planning permission to developer Estuary View Enterprises for 140 apartments on the grounds of the former mother and baby institution in Blackrock. Between 1922 and 1998, the Sacred Heart nuns ran Bessborough. Nineteen mothers and 859 infants associated with the institution are missing; 878 people in total. Their burial places are not known. Fewer than 70 of those children have known burial sites. The rest are, in the starkest possible terms, among this nation’s disappeared.
What makes this more troubling still is what the State has chosen not to do. Unlike at Tuam, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation did not carry out geophysical surveys at Bessborough, despite concluding that it is “highly likely that burials did take place in the grounds”. The records, testimony and analyses the Commission gathered on death and burial at Bessborough remain sealed in the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. The families of the disappeared cannot access them. Neither, it appears, can An Coimisiún Pleanála.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has stated plainly that the State carries a legal obligation under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights to make every effort to investigate these deaths. Human rights academics, including members of the Clann Project, have written to An Coimisiún Pleanála pointing out that, as a matter of European and international human rights law, the State cannot displace or delegate its obligations to investigate deaths effectively, and yet that is precisely what Cork City Council’s planning conditions attempt to do. The permission requires the developer to employ a forensic archaeologist to monitor site works and to notify the City Coroner and Gardaí should human remains be located. This is not an investigation. It is a patch. It outsources a State obligation to a private developer and calls it a condition.
Survivors have protested outside Leinster House. Cork City councillors have unanimously passed a motion calling on council officials to work with central government towards a compulsory purchase order of the remaining 60 acres. A decision on the planning appeals is expected in July. Anyone wishing to make an observation to An Coimisiún Pleanála on the Bessborough appeal – case reference 324153 – must do so by this Friday, 17 April, online at pleanala.ie or by post, at a cost of €50.
Carmel Cantwell, whose mother was incarcerated at Bessborough and whose infant brother died there, put it with devastating simplicity. Of the original 210-acre estate, 150 acres has already been developed, for housing, a hospital, offices, and a retail park. Was it too much to ask that the remaining 60 acres be preserved as a park of remembrance for the 923 children who died, the 31 women, and the nearly 19,000 women and children who passed through those gates, most separated from their children by force?
That is not a planning objection. That is a community telling the system, clearly and repeatedly, that it does not understand what it is dealing with.
The second case is Creeslough. In October 2022, an explosion at a service station in Creeslough, Co. Donegal, killed ten people, among them a five-year-old girl and her father, a thirteen-year-old boy and his mother, and a fourteen-year-old girl. Files have been submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions by An Garda Síochána, the Health and Safety Authority, and the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities. The DPP is expected to take three to six months to decide on prosecutions. The families have not yet received justice. They do not yet have answers.
And yet, in March 2026, Donegal County Council granted planning permission for a new commercial development – including underground fuel storage tanks and pumps – on the site immediately beside where those ten people died. The application was submitted without any prior consultation with bereaved families. Solicitors acting for eight of those families described their clients as “deeply distressed and profoundly offended,” calling the application “a serious affront to the dignity and memory of the ten people who tragically lost their lives”.
This week, the bereaved families met Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan. The meeting lasted over an hour. The Minister has indicated he will consider holding an inquest with a senior judge or senior coroner, along the lines of the Stardust model, before the criminal investigation is concluded. That is welcome. But it has taken nearly four years to get to this point. Four years of missed milestones the families are carrying, while a planning permission threatens their place of grief and grieving
This is the context in which that planning permission was granted. It is wrong.
And it is bad placemaking.
Place is about more than buildings. The spaces between buildings shape a community as powerfully as the buildings themselves. At its core, place is shaped by people, and people – in turn – are shaped by their places. This is where belonging lives. It is also where loss lives, and grief, and the kind of unresolved trauma that does not dissolve simply because a planning clock has run its course.
There is an emerging body of scholarship and practice that takes this seriously. Dr.s Cara Courage and Anita McKeown, both Fellows of the Institute of Place Management, have developed a framework called trauma-informed placemaking, published in their 2024 Routledge textbook of the same name. They posit that the potential of place to hold or cause trauma is rarely acknowledged in planning practice, and that absence causes harm. Further 2025 academic work in trauma and related interventions in urban planning, by researchers Nicole Lanphier, Linda Fox-Rogers and Enda Murphy, found precisely this gap; they demonstrate that trauma-aware thinking has emerged in planning theory but has not been integrated into broader planning processes.
If not now, when?
Courage and McKeown’s framework offers a number of operational principles, including the responsibility of local planners and placemakers to resist re-traumatising the community.
Both local authorities are failing this. There was no realisation of trauma-in-place evident in either decision. There was no recognition of what the community was communicating. There was no trauma-informed response. And there was no attempt to resist further harm.
Planning is a process, and a deficient one at that. Communities are experts in their own lives and their own places. No planning report contains the knowledge that a Bessborough survivor carries. No planning inspector’s assessment can substitute for what the Creeslough families know about what that site means and what it needs to be. And no planning process that excludes that knowledge can claim full legitimacy.
Ireland has a statutory framework for public participation in planning; tik-box, at best. What it does not have is any mechanism that distinguishes standard consultation from trauma-sensitive engagement. Sending a letter inviting observations on a planning application is not the same as sitting with a bereaved community, understanding their relationship to a place, and asking them what should happen there. Listening. The difference matters. In these two cases, the difference is everything.
What Bessborough and Creeslough need is not just appeals and reversals, though the Bessborough appeal must succeed, and the Creeslough decision deserves serious re-examination. What they need is a trauma-informed approach to planning these places. That means mandatory trauma-impact consideration for sites carrying histories of violence, loss, or institutional abuse. It means genuine community co-design processes that begin before planning applications are lodged. It means, at minimum, that the affected community has a meaningful and equal seat at the planning table. They are not merely consultees to be managed, but people with authority over their own place.
Two communities are waiting. They have been waiting a long time. The very least the planning system can do right now is stop making things worse.
*Extracted from an essay on ‘When Planning Becomes Re-Traumatisation: The Case for Trauma-Informed Placemaking in Ireland’: https://caroltallon.com/when-planning-becomes-re-traumatisation-the-case-for-trauma-informed-placemaking-in-ireland/
