The Government should impose a tax on sites in rural areas to curb the unrestricted spread of dispersed housing throughout the countryside, the Irish Planning Institute's annual conference was told here yesterday.
Mr Brendan McGrath, senior executive planner with Clare County Council, said such fiscal measures were urgently needed to direct development to the right places rather than allowing it to happen anywhere and everywhere.
"Doing nothing is not an option," he declared, following the recent revelation that 18,000 - 36 per cent - of last year's record output of 50,000 new homes in the State were "one-off" houses in the countryside.
Mr McGrath suggested that important scenic landscapes such as the Burren in Co Clare, the peninsular areas of Cork and Kerry and the Wicklow uplands should be designated at national level to prevent them being despoiled.
He also proposed that farmers be paid more under the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme to manage and conserve rural landscapes in order to ease the financial pressure on them to sell sites for bungalows.
He said housing in the countryside was at least as significant in its impact as shopping centres and should be the subject of an equivalent ministerial directive to the planning authorities restricting its development.
There was also a need to require local authorities to provide affordable housing in rural parishes as an alternative to dispersed single houses while, simultaneously, putting a brake on holiday homes.
Mr McGrath said that achieving "proper planning and sustainable development" - in the words of last year's landmark Planning Act - would require "very courageous action at a political level" to deal with the rural housing issue.
Mr Ian Lumley, heritage officer of An Taisce, conceded there was a "huge popular demand for housing in the countryside", not least because it was cheaper and more attractive than buying a house on a suburban estate.
However, the long-term social and economic costs of servicing dispersed housing - such as providing school transport or "meals on wheels" - was not taken into account.
Mr Lumley also warned that unless stringent policies were put in place after "a 40-year experiment in laissez-faire planning", the motorways and other major roads now being planned would become the sinews of further suburbanisation.
He said this process was being directly encouraged by tax incentives in the Upper Shannon Rural Renewal Area, which includes all of counties Leitrim and Longford, with many of the new houses there targeted at Dublin commuters.
Mr John Cleland, a senior official of the Northern Ireland Department of the Environment, acknowledged that rural housing was by far the most controversial and contentious aspect of the work of its planning service.
The movement of people from cities and towns due to the Troubles had generated pressure for houses in the countryside within commuting distance of Belfast, with the potential to change its character forever.
Prof James Walsh of NUI Maynooth said the National Spatial Strategy being drafted would have to address such issues as whether an alternative to the Dublin-Belfast economic corridor would be viable.
