When Planning Becomes Re-Traumatisation
The Case for Trauma-Informed Placemaking in Ireland
I have spent decades in the built environment as an unapologetically pro-development professional. I believe in the power of construction to transform communities, to create homes, to stimulate economies, and to shape the physical fabric of a better society. I will not be apologising for that. But I have also learned – and I keep learning – that development in the absence of place-understanding can be an unwelcome imposition on the community.
Place is about so much more than buildings. The spaces between buildings shape place as powerfully as the buildings themselves. The park where grief is quietly carried. The street corner where a community pauses. The field where the unacknowledged dead are buried. These are not incidental to place – they are constitutive of it. At the core, places are not made by planners or developers. They are shaped by people. And people, in turn, are shaped by their places. This is not sentiment. It is the foundational truth of placemaking as a discipline, and it goes directly to the question of belonging – of who is allowed to belong, whose story a place tells, and whose pain a place holds.
Two planning decisions in Ireland in early 2026 have forced this question to the surface with extraordinary urgency. Both are, in their different ways, acts of institutional re-traumatisation. Both demand a different approach. And both illustrate precisely why trauma-informed placemaking is not a theoretical exercise – it is a professional and moral obligation.
Bessborough
In February 2026, Cork City Council granted planning permission to developer Estuary View Enterprises for a 140-unit apartment development on the grounds of the former Bessborough mother and baby institution in Blackrock, Cork. The development involves the demolition of ten agricultural buildings and the construction of residential apartments across three blocks.
The decision is staggering in its institutional insensitivity. Between 1922 and 1998, the Sacred Heart nuns ran Bessborough. The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation reported 923 child deaths relating to the institution. Of those children, fewer than 70 have known burial sites. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has stated unequivocally that the burial sites of almost 900 women and children who died at Bessborough have not been found, and that the State carries a legal obligation under the European Convention on Human Rights – specifically Article 2 – to make every effort to fully investigate their deaths. Human rights academics including Dr Maeve O’Rourke, Dr Claire McGettrick and Dr Máiréad Enright of the Clann Project have written to An Coimisiún Pleanála noting that the State “is aware of a situation of mass disappearance” and that the probability of burials in the grounds of Bessborough had previously been the basis for An Bord Pleanála and An Coimisiún Pleanála to refuse planning permission for the site multiple times since May 2021.
The Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group has described the site as one of “profound national significance“, with survivor testimony indicating burials across the site, including the very locations of the proposed development. Carmel Cantwell, a campaigner whose mother was incarcerated at Bessborough, has pointed out that of the original 210-acre estate,150 acres have already been developed – for housing, a hospital, offices, and a retail park. She has asked a simple, devastating question: was it too much to ask that the last 60 acres be preserved as a park of remembrance for the 923 babies who died, the 31 women, and the nearly 19,000 women and children who passed through Bessborough, the majority separated through forced adoption?
It was not too much to ask. The answer should have been obvious. And yet, here we are.
A protest gathered outside Leinster House in March 2026 under the banner ‘No Building Over Bessborough’. Separate appeals have been lodged with An Coimisiún Pleanála by the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group and by Labour Party city councillor Peter Horgan, with a decision expected by 9 July 2026. The ICCL has called for planning permission to be halted immediately and for the State to establish a framework for exhumations and plans for a site of conscience at Bessborough.
Creeslough
On 7 October 2022, an explosion at a service station and apartment complex in Creeslough, Co. Donegal, killed ten people. They were Shauna Flanagan-Garwe (5) and her father Robert Garwe (50); Catherine O’Donnell (39) and her son James Monaghan (13); Leona Harper (14); Jessica Gallagher (24); Martina Martin (49); James O’Flaherty (48); Martin McGill (49); and Hugh Kelly (59).
In March 2026, Donegal County Council granted planning permission for a development on the site immediately beside where those ten people died. The application – for a new shop, post office, off-licence, deli, forecourt, underground storage tanks, fuel pumps, ATM, car wash, and outdoor laundrette – was submitted without any prior consultation with the bereaved families or survivors. Damien Tansey Solicitors, acting on behalf of eight clients who each lost a loved one in the explosion, submitted a response to the planning application describing their clients as “deeply distressed and profoundly offended“. Their submission stated that the application was “submitted without any prior consultation with the bereaved families or the survivors, and without any acknowledgement of the ongoing grief, trauma and suffering that the Creeslough Community continues to endure“. They further described the application as “a serious affront to the dignity and memory of the ten people who tragically lost their lives”.
Critically, three separate investigations into the cause of the explosion remain ongoing. Gardaí submitted a supplementary file – in addition to the primary file submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions on 29 September 2025 – that includes formal recommendations from An Garda Síochána. The bereaved families have not yet received justice. They do not yet have answers. And into that open wound, a planning process has granted permission for a fuel-related commercial development on the same site – a development that, as one submission noted, the community “understandably lacks confidence in“.
Earlier this year a delegation of bereaved families met with Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan to discuss, among other matters, the question of a public inquiry into the tragedy. A community that is still waiting for truth, still waiting for justice, is now also being asked to accept development decisions taken without them. This is not planning. This is harm.
The Emerging Framework for Trauma-Informed Placemaking
These two cases are not isolated failures of individual planning authorities. They are symptomatic of a systemic absence of trauma-awareness in Ireland’s spatial planning process.
Dr.s Cara Courage and Anita McKeown coined the term “trauma-informed placemaking” during the 2020 syndemic, and their landmark edited textbook Trauma Informed Placemaking (Routledge, 2024: Amazon link – https://amzn.to/4e6X6WM) represents the first sustained gathering of praxis in this field. Their argument is foundational: while place is commonly viewed as either contested or convivial, its potential to hold or cause trauma is rarely acknowledged. They position trauma-awareness not as an optional lens, but as essential to understanding and working meaningfully with place. The book draws 66 contributors from 14 countries across 36 chapters, offering 20 original frameworks, toolkits and learning exercises and proposing a clear pathway through six principles for a trauma-informed approach (drawing on the Trauma Informed Institute, 2023):
- Safety: Develop an awareness of trauma in place.
- Trustworthiness and Transparency: Understand trauma in place as placemakers.
- Peer Support: Ask ourselves, what can we do as placemakers?
- Collaboration and Mutuality: Consider a Community of Praxis.
- Empowerment, Voice and Choice: Become part of the community.
- Cultural, Historical and Gender Issues: Our call to action: be mindful.
Apply any one of these six principles to Bessborough or Creeslough, and the gap between the standard applied and the standard required becomes self-evident. Was there safety – an awareness of trauma in place – in the Bessborough planning process? Were families in Creeslough consulted as partners, empowered, given voice and choice? Were the cultural, historical, and gendered dimensions of Bessborough – a site of institutionalised State and Church violence against women and children – given their due weight? The answers are plainly no.
This is not a theoretical shortfall. Lanphier, Fox-Rogers and Murphy, in their systematic scoping review Trauma and Related Interventions in Urban Planning (2025), published in the Journal of Planning Literature, trace the theoretical evolution of trauma-aware planning and categorise interventions into three typologies: awareness-building, response-oriented, and transformative approaches. Their findings reveal theoretical and practical gaps across the field, including “a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of trauma-aware practices and their integration into broader planning processes beyond engagement“. In other words, even where trauma-aware thinking has entered planning discourse, it has not yet been embedded in planning process. The cases of Bessborough and Creeslough are Irish illustrations of exactly this gap.
Lanphier et al. note that trauma-aware approaches in planning have gained attention in relation to natural disasters, war, violent conflict, and planning decisions that intersect with racial discrimination – including urban renewal schemes. What is missing from that list, and what these two Irish cases demand we add, is institutional trauma: the intergenerational harm caused by State and Church violence, and the acute communal trauma of sudden mass loss. Both Bessborough and Creeslough represent categories of trauma that the Irish planning system has no formal mechanism to recognise, let alone to address.
The Four Rs: Where Irish Planning Is Failing
Courage and McKeown’s framework offers four operational principles – the four Rs – that translate trauma-informed awareness into practice. They are: Realise, Recognise, Respond, and Resist. The last of these is the hinge on which everything else turns.
- Realise requires an intentional awareness of trauma and its presence in place. Both Cork City Council and Donegal County Council proceeded with planning decisions without any apparent realisation that they were operating on sites of acute, unresolved, community-held trauma. The planning inspector’s report on the Creeslough application concluded that the proposed development “would not injure the amenities of the area”. That conclusion is technically inadequate. It does not engage with the human reality of the place.
- Recognise requires the ability to read the signs of trauma — and those signs were not subtle. Survivors speaking publicly. Legal submissions. Protests. Human rights organisations calling for a halt. Letters from academics citing international human rights law obligations. These are not planning objections of the ordinary kind. They are the voice of traumatised communities telling the system clearly and repeatedly that it does not understand what it is dealing with.
- Respond requires a trauma-informed response proportionate to what has been recognised. This does not mean refusing all development in perpetuity. It means pausing, listening, consulting, and designing responses that centre the community’s needs. It means that before any groundworks are approved at Bessborough, the State must first fulfil its Article 2 ECHR obligations and locate the remains of those buried there. It means that before any development is granted on the Creeslough site, the bereaved families must have been meaningfully engaged, justice processes completed, and the community given genuine agency over what happens in their place.
- Resist re-traumatising the community. This is the most important principle of all, and it is the one being most visibly violated right now. As of this week, the Creeslough families are travelling to Dublin to seek a meeting with the Minister for Justice about a public inquiry, while simultaneously having to contend with planning decisions taken without them on the site where their loved ones died. The Bessborough families are appealing to An Coimisiún Pleanála a planning decision that, by its very existence, sends a signal that the State has not yet finished failing them. Both local authorities are, at this moment, actively re-traumatising the communities they are supposed to serve. They need to stop.
The Community Knows Best
There is a principle that cuts across trauma-informed placemaking, community development, and participatory planning alike; communities are experts in their own lives and their own places. No planning inspector, however competent, possesses the knowledge of place that is held by a survivor of Bessborough, or a parent who lost a child in Creeslough. No planning report can substitute for that knowledge. And no planning process that excludes it can claim legitimacy.
Courage and McKeown’s call to action – to build a Community of Praxis, to centre empowerment, voice and choice – is a direct challenge to the procedural formalism that allows planning authorities to discharge their functions without ever genuinely listening. Ireland has a statutory framework for public participation in planning. What it does not yet have is a framework that distinguishes between standard consultation and trauma-sensitive engagement. Sending a letter to a bereaved family inviting them to submit observations on a planning application is not the same as sitting with them, understanding their relationship to that place, and co-designing what should happen there.
What both Bessborough and Creeslough require is not just appeals and reversals, though those may well be warranted. What they require is a real change in how planning authorities approach sites of trauma. That means statutory guidance. It means mandatory trauma impact assessment alongside environmental impact assessment for sites carrying histories of violence, loss, or institutional abuse. It means community co-design processes that begin before planning applications are lodged, not after. It means that the affected community has an equal seat at the planning table – not as consultees, but as decision-makers.
The academic and advocacy work is ahead of the policy. Courage and McKeown have built the framework. Lanphier, Fox-Rogers and Murphy have mapped the field. What is needed now is for Irish planning policy – from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, through An Coimisiún Pleanála, to local authority planning departments – to take this seriously as a matter of professional practice.
Two communities are waiting. They have been waiting long enough. The least the planning system can do now is stop making things worse.
Resist re-traumatising the community.