Virtually all of Ireland's small villages are suffering significant population decline as the countryside around them is suburbanised by growing numbers of single houses, according to a Department of the Environment paper.
It says the number of planning applications for rural housing went up by between 20 per cent and 70 per cent in the period 1997-1999. Last year, of the record 50,000 new homes, 36 per cent were "one-off" houses in the countryside.
Based on official estimates, houses built in rural areas last year consumed 2,700 hectares (6,480 acres) of agricultural land and resulted in the loss of an estimated 540 kilometres (337 miles) of natural hedge-rows to create new boundaries.
It has resulted in 18,000 more septic tanks to the national total, now estimated at 357,000, raising fears for the protection of groundwater sources, especially in more vulnerable areas where development pressures are also strongest.
The Department's planners, who prepared the paper during work on the National Spatial Strategy, said all rural areas were showing "markedly increased levels of residential development", with percentage increases in rural areas out-pacing total output.
Only 44 per cent of county development plans articulate the varying levels of development pressures or planning issues across their area of jurisdiction, and even fewer planning authorities bother to map these issues, according to the paper.
Almost half have no specific policies requiring controls on the occupancy or use of new housing in rural areas, while only a third have any requirements giving guidelines on the siting and design of houses in the countryside, it says.
"In general, the contentiousness of rural housing as a spatial planning issue for planning authorities has been leading to a situation where development plan policies are increasingly being framed in a loose manner" to accommodate the pressures.
"Are housing policies which favour rural dwellers per se, as opposed to those functionally related to rural areas, policies at all?" the planners ask, adding that local authorities should seek binding legal agreements to ensure new houses are for "local need".
The planners note that rural housing is predominantly and increasingly car-dependent, with consequential increases in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as generating more pressure on rural roads and more demand for parking in towns.
They also query whether the Government's 1999 White Paper on Rural Development, which espouses the objective of maintaining a dispersed population in the countryside, can be reconciled with the overriding requirement to achieve sustainable development.
Sustainable Development: A Strategy for Ireland, which has been official policy since 1997, says urban-generated rural housing is "generally unsustainable" because of the energy it consumes, the traffic it generates and the pressure it puts on water supplies.
Unless housing in rural areas is associated with the needs of the rural community, then "the energy needs and landscape, transportation and environmental impacts of dispersed settlement patterns render these contrary to the principles of sustainable development".
The same strategy also flagged the negative impact on the fabric of towns and villages of permitting unlimited development in the countryside - and this point is taken up by the Department's planners, who say small villages are being turned into "doughnuts".
Though their physical form might remain intact, figures show that the 448 villages with less than 1,000 in population are losing out because of the concentration of new residential development in their hinterlands over the past 15 to 20 years, according to the paper.
The paper feeds into the National Spatial Strategy, which the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, sees as a key to putting shape on the National Development Plan. Work on the strategy is behind schedule, largely because of the foot-and-mouth crisis. The aim of the strategy is to promote more balanced regional development and take some pressure off the greater Dublin area.
