The "epidemic" of one-off houses in the countryside is now threatening implementation of the Government's £40 billion National Development Plan, according to the president of the Irish Planning Institute.
Opening the IPI's annual conference yesterday, Mr Philip Jones said the spread of rural housing had created "an army of objectors to any infrastructural works that might spoil their view or impose any inconvenience on their new `pastoral' way of life.
"We are transforming NIMBYs into BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)", he said. "Every piece of infrastructure which is necessary for the National Plan is being fought tooth-and-nail by rural dwellers, the great majority of whom are not farmers. "We are fast ensuring that every townland in Ireland will be populated by people who see the countryside as their property - and woe betide any county council, National Roads Authority, electricity supplier, telecom company or even alternative energy supplier who seeks to bring in necessary infrastructure."
Referring to the recent "explosive" revelation that more than one in three new homes built in the past five years were one-off houses in rural areas, Mr Jones said this trend was "based on an attitude that sees nothing wrong with growing crops of bungalows as the more traditional agricultural crops become less profitable". Apart from being unsustainable, because it depended on the private car for all the necessities of life, such housing prevented the building-up of smaller towns and villages and was also destroying the landscape by making Irish rural roads look like "the worst examples of American Plains suburbia". "How can we continue to countenance this national scandal?", Mr Jones asked, at a time when the State was being brought before the European Court for failing to comply with EU standards on the quality of rural water supplies - "polluted by the effluent from a myriad of septic tanks" serving "this rash of one-off housing". In the IPI's view, only people who could demonstrate a need - as opposed to a desire - to live in rural areas should be permitted to do so. And this need "should be based on objective criteria such as a person's employment and not on their mere ownership of land". Mr Jones acknowledged a large proportion of county councillors saw nothing wrong with one-off housing and regarded the caution and concerns expressed by planners as inimical to the clientilism of local democracy, under which their key role was to service the needs of individual constituents. The conflict between councillors and planners had become so acute in Co Kerry that the county manager and his planning staff "were warned that they would not be safe in certain areas of the county, such was the alleged public anger at refusals". This amounted almost to "incitement to hatred", he said. Proposals to amend the Kerry county plan so that a farmer's financial need would become a material planning consideration or that farmers should be allowed clusters of five to seven houses on their lands illustrated such an "irresponsible attitude to planning" that it called into question the councillors' role. Mr Jones quoted an editorial in the Kerryman which said local councillors thought it more important to "curry favour among voters seeking planning permission" than to consider the long-term implications of their decisions. And it queried "whether people such as this should have any involvement at all in the planning process". He said it was hard to disagree with this sentiment or to ask whether the Minister for the Environment, who was already taking away the councillors' powers to decide on waste management issues, should not also, in the national interest, consider removing their planning powers to facilitate implementation of the National Development Plan.
