The broadcaster and president of An Taisce, Eanna Ní Lamhna, has said the organisation was being used as "a whipping boy and an excuse for things not happening".
Ms Ní Lamhna said that statistics clearly showed An Taisce blocked very few developments.
She said Kerry County Council last year received 4,440 planning applications and of these An Taisce made submissions on 269 and appealed just nine decisions.
Eight of these appeals were upheld by the appeals board and the board endorsed one of the decisions by the council.
That proved that An Taisce was being used as a whipping boy, she added.
An Taisce was a prescribed body which meant local authorities were obliged to notify the organisation of developments in sensitive locations, Ms Ní Lamhna said, in advance of a talk entitled "Leaving the Land" at the weekend Brendan Kennelly Festival in Ballylongford, Co Kerry.
Ms Ní Lamhna said she was not against one-off housing, but An Taisce wanted a vibrant community living and working in the locality.
Second homes and people driving more than 30 miles to work each day did not make for this.
During an Easter visit to Waterville, the golf and seaside town in south Kerry which has seen massive tax-driven holiday home development, some 70 per cent of the houses "had the lights out" Ms Ní Lamhna noticed.
"This is not a vibrant community," she added.
She also presented statistics showing that Irish people were the worst in Europe when it came to the amount of driving they did annually.
Irish people on average clocked up 20,000km a year and nobody now could walk or cycle on the choked roads of rural Ireland.
The land was not being left, there had been an increase in the population on the land, but there was a marked decrease in the number of farms.
The question was who were the people now living in rural Ireland and what were they doing, Ms Ní Lamhna added.