An Taisce has challenged archaeologist Dr Seamus Caulfield about his comments on the rural planning issue. Mr Ian Lumley, heritage officer of An Taisce, was responding to a recent report in this column, in which Dr Caulfield called for the organisation to be de-listed and challenged its use of statistics on housing development.
Dr Caulfield, who is best known for his work on the Ceide Fields in north Mayo, has been accused by Mr Lumley of being "anti-planning" and of "advocating the sociology of the 19th-century potato patch" to dictate contemporary housing location.
"Circumstances have changed," Mr Lumley says. "We have moved towards a suburban and car-dependent model of rural life, and the social, economic and environmental effects of one-off housing have entirely changed over the last 30 years, let alone since pre-history, which is Dr Caulfield's time frame.
"Dr Caulfield, the archaeologist, misinterprets how Irish settlement patterns developed," Mr Lumley says. "Archaeology shows that agricultural settlements were communal and nucleated - this remains the case in many European countries - until after the medieval period."
"There were good reasons for this," Mr Lumley says. "Ringforts were places of protection for people and animals in a country which was heavily forested and where dangerous animals roamed widely. Our current land divisions were created by the landlord era of the 18th and early 19th centuries when agricultural holdings were reduced in size to create the unsustainable pattern of holdings we had at the time of the Famine.
"The reason so many houses were dispersed across the landscape in Ireland is that people needed to have their own potato patches and grazing for a few cattle," he continues, adding that this was consolidated in the west by the Congested Districts Board.
"The major problem facing rural Ireland is the decline in the numbers able to achieve a livelihood through farming. An Taisce fully supports the maintenance of a working population on the land, and the provision of appropriately located and designed houses to meet this need."
Mr Lumley claims that Dr Caulfield has misinterpreted An Taisce's policy. He also stands over his organisation's statistics that 36 per cent of new housing is in the countryside, of which 80 to 90 per cent is one-off. Regarding the 50 per cent of new housing in the greater Dublin area, only 1 per cent is one-off and the figures come from the Department of the Environment, he says.
Dr Caulfield says Mr Lumley's statistics are "totally at variance" with those of the Department of the Environment, and he takes issue with the comments on settlement patterns.
"And if An Taisce believes that the dispersed settlement began with the potato, and young people are now being denied planning permission on the back of this, that is even more shocking," hesays.
It is obvious that Mr Lumley has never visited the Ceide Fields, he adds. Dr Caulfield finds the accusation that he is "anti-planning" offensive. He has been a member of a Department of Environment expert advisory group linked to the National Spatial Strategy, but stresses that his comments on this issue are made in a personal capacity.