LIMERICK Chamber has issued a strong call to government to immediately reform how International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) facilities are being delivered within cities, warning that the current approach is “financially distorting, strategically misaligned, and socially unsustainable”.
In a letter sent to Housing Minister James Browne and Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan, Limerick Chamber CEO Michelle Gallagher expressed deep concern that the use of planning exemptions for IPAS developments is “circumventing local development strategies, creating a two-tier planning system, and incentivising short-term institutional use of prime city centre buildings over long-term housing, education, or commercial projects”.
“Limerick’s city centre is being pushed in the wrong direction,” Ms Gallagher warned government.
“We are seeing critical development sites diverted from sustainable residential or enterprise use toward high-yield institutional accommodation, because government contracts are simply too lucrative to compete with. This is not planning, it’s policy failure.”
Key concerns highlighted by Limerick Chamber include special exemptions allowing the Limerick Local Development Plan 2022–2028 to be bypassed and artificially inflating city centre property values because IPAS contracts are so lucrative.
The Chamber also said the exemptions are feeding a “two-tier system. While traditional developers face rigorous planning conditions, costs, and community obligations, IPAS accommodation providers can sidestep these entirely, facing lower risk and receiving higher return.”
“Limerick’s city centre already hosts a high concentration of social services, and clustering more IPAS centres in the same locations risks overburdening infrastructure and deepening urban inequality,” the Chamber boss wrote.
“This is a textbook example of short-term thinking producing long-term entrenched planning challenges.
“You cannot regenerate a city centre by saturating it with temporary profit-driven accommodation while sidelining permanent housing, students, families, and commercial activity.”
Limerick Chamber’s has four key demands for government, according to Ms Gallagher’s letter: to end planning exemptions for IPAS accommodation and subject all developments to full planning processes; to introduce a balanced regional and local dispersal policy to avoid over-concentration of services in vulnerable city areas; to reform IPAS procurement contracts to avoid distorting the local housing market and blocking sustainable development; and to engage in structured consultation with local authorities and business stakeholders, including Limerick Chamber, prior to locating future IPAS sites.
The Chamber is also calling on the government to “act swiftly,” warning that failure to do so “risks undoing years of regeneration efforts and compromising the strategic goals of national and regional policies such as Housing for All, the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund, National Planning Framework, and the Limerick 2030 Economic and Spatial Plan”.
“If we continue with this trajectory, we are trading our city’s sustainably planned future for highly-lucrative short-term contracts. The policy must be realigned before irreversible damage is done,” MsGallagher concluded.
