The Government should establish a special commission to investigate the scale of Ireland's rural housing phenomenon which is now "spiralling out of control", according to a former president of the Irish Planning Institute.
Writing in the current issue of the institute's journal, Pleanail, Mr Fergal MacCabe says such a commission would need to set out clearly "the nature and scale of the situation, analyse why it is happening, the probable consequences and the possible solutions".
In an article entitled "How We Wrecked Rural Ireland", Mr MacCabe writes: "Go up any rural road in Ireland and you will find nests of bungalows all over the place. It is now out of hand and many planning authorities, it seems to me, have thrown in the towel."
Donegal and Kerry were "beyond redemption" while Kildare was "heading that way". Some counties such as Westmeath had "tried to hold back the tide" while An Bord Pleanala "generally rejects any unjustified rural housing that comes to it on appeal".
At local level, not only were planning permissions freely available, but some county councillors "regard it as their aggressive duty to see that as many one-off houses as possible are provided in the countryside, regardless of any longer-term consequences".
In his home county of Offaly, Mr MacCabe notes, the once-unspoilt 13-mile route from Tullamore to Croghan Hill was now lined with "uniformly awful" bungalows while the sites in between them were "festooned with notices" seeking to build more. "The few farmhouses I remembered were now abandoned and decayed and, ironically, the only unspoilt part of the whole route where no housing had occurred was where you might have expected it - in the little village of Kilclonfert with its church and school."
Although nearly every county development plan "mouths pious policies restricting rural housing to farmers' children" or others with locational needs, it was "as plain as a pikestaff that the amount of rural housing built bears no relationship to that policy".
To build a house, "applicants must tell lies and planning authorities must turn a blind eye. Everybody knows that the permission granted to the local will be sold on to a non-local and nobody objects because they might want to do it themselves next week."
Among the measures proposed by Mr MacCabe would be a prohibition on the freehold title to a family farm being subdivided so new houses could not be sold on independently.
Mr MacCabe, who provided the planning input to the Bacon reports and the 1999 Residential Density Guidelines, says Irish people "don't yet have an appreciation of urban values which might convince us that more beautiful houses could be built in towns and villages".
Yesterday he told The Irish Times that all rural authorities should draw up plans for the development of villages which have been losing population as more and more people build homes in the countryside.
Farm organisations including the Irish Farmers Association and the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association have insisted the sons and daughters of farmers should be entitled to build houses on family farms.
The president of the ICMSA, Mr Pat O'Rourke, said if permission to build houses where they grew up was refused, rural Ireland would be denuded of its population. He rejected the suggestion that the houses built by farmers' offspring were wrecking the landscape.
The IFA's deputy president, Mr John Dillon, insisted farmers were not to blame. "It's other people from towns and cities that are building in rural areas that are causing the problem," he said.
