Sustainable Rural Housing: Planning authorities are being instructed by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, to implement new guidelines on housing in the countryside even though they are still in draft form.
"The policy move and directional change is clear," the Minister said yesterday when he published the draft guidelines, called Sustainable Rural Housing, which are open for public consultation until April 30th.
"These new guidelines are based on a presumption that people who have roots in or links to rural areas, and are part of and contribute to the rural community, will get planning permission for houses," he said.
This would apply even in rural areas where there was already strong pressure for urban-generated housing, subject to the normal requirements of good planning such as road safety and proper treatment of sewage.
"New houses in rural areas should, of course, be located and designed to integrate well with their physical surroundings and be generally compatible with the conservation of sensitive areas such as natural habitats," Mr Cullen said.
But he made it clear that the statutory designation of Special Areas of Conservation, Special Protection Areas and Natural Heritage Areas was not intended to operate as an inflexible constraint on housing development.
"Anyone wishing to build a house in rural areas suffering persistent and substantial population decline will be accommodated, subject to good planning practice in siting and design even if they have no roots in the area."
The Minister denied that the new policy would open the floodgates by abandoning any sense of a planned approach to rural housing. It was "not a panacea to concrete over Ireland" and people would not be allowed to "build on top of mountains".
Emphasising the need for good design, he said he did not want to see the countryside covered with house designs plucked out of pattern books. However, he accepted that only 10 to 12 per cent of one-off houses were designed by architects.
Given that groundwater in Ireland was identified as a "key asset", he said he was considering whether any additional measures were required to ensure that septic tanks and other sewage treatment systems were monitored and maintained.
Mr Cullen said the guidelines were intended to ensure a "vibrant future for all rural areas" and he called on planning authorities to review their development plans so that they were consistent with the Government's new policy on rural housing.
"Significant population decline in rural areas should trigger the need for . . . policies aimed at encouraging housing development at appropriate identified locations in parallel with promoting development and economic activity in smaller villages and towns," he said.
However, the guidelines say past experience has shown that planning policies need to make a distinction between "urban-generated" and "rural-generated" housing, particularly close to cities and towns, to avoid ribbon or haphazard development.
But in defining people "considered as constituting those with rural-generated housing needs", the draft says planning authorities "should avoid being so prescriptive as to end up with a very rigid development control system".
It defines those who are intrinsically part of the rural community as including "farmers, their sons and daughters and/or any persons taking over the ownership and running of farms, as well as people who have lived most of their lives in rural areas".
Others who would qualify as working full-time or part-time in rural areas include those engaged in forestry, inland waterways or marine-related occupations as well as teachers in rural schools. But it would be up to local authorities to define eligibility.
In rural areas under strong pressure for urban-generated housing, it would be reasonable for planning authorities to impose conditions specifying that a new house must be occupied by the applicant, rather than sold on to others.
