The shocking statistics from last year are already well known: of the record total output of 50,000 new homes throughout the State, 36 per cent were single houses in the countryside. And how the Government can reconcile what is happening on the ground with its declared commitment to "sustainable development" is a mystery.
The all-time record 18,000 "one-off" 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 hedgerows to create new boundaries, set back from the roadway to provide safer sightlines and turning radii for motorists.
Last year's output of bungalows or two-storey houses in the countryside came on top of 10,000 built in 1997, 11,000 in 1998 and 14,000 in 1999. In total, for those three years, rural housing consumed 5,250 hectares (12,600 acres) of land, assuming an average site area of 0.15 ha (0.36 acres).
At the same time, nearly all of Ireland's small villages have experienced significant population decline over the past 15 to 20 years. In effect, what we are seeing is the creation of "doughnut" villages, whose physical form may remain intact, but whose hinterland is the area where development is concentrated.
These "worrying trends", as Department of the Environment planners call them, are highlighted in a paper produced for the National Spatial Strategy, which is to offer a blueprint for more balanced regional development.
One of the key objectives of the paper was to compare various policies already in place with "what is unfolding on the ground". It also asks how the Government's 1999 White Paper on Rural Development, which favoured maintaining dispersed rural communities, can be reconciled with the Sustainable Development Strategy of 1997.
After all, as the planners note, 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.
The paper also contains a serious health warning about the implications for groundwater protection of adding new septic tanks to rural landscapes at an average rate of more than 13,000 every year.
The planners note that a recent sample survey by the Environmental Protection Agency of 1,200 group water schemes found that 42 per cent were polluted by faecal coliforms or other contaminants.
This level of contamination, caused by agricultural run-off as well as septic tanks for housing, indicated that groundwater protection measures were "totally inadequate". Thus, the planners recommend that still-pristine sources need to be fully identified and monitored, with appropriate spatial policies developed to protect them. "This issue is one of the more pressing ones relating to dispersed rural settlement," the planners said.
They correctly identify as one of the main driving forces for urban-generated rural housing the fact that farmers can sell sites for "many multiples" of their agricultural value. Today's housing market has intensified this trend, as well as the tendency to deceive planning authorities that new houses are for sons or daughters.
The debate about urban-generated housing in the countryside is a "battlefield of hearts and minds" between the interests of individuals on the one hand and sustainable development principles on the other. Controls borrowed from Britain had been resisted by the "indigenous enthusiasm for a laissez-faire approach to rural housing."
According to the paper, "one of the fundamental issues that underscore the rural housing question is that society in general has not perhaps come to terms with the profound and irreversible changes that have occurred in rural Ireland over the past 30 years or so" - notably the fact that many landscapes had been suburbanised.
The planners say "further work" is needed to refine the Government's 1999 White Paper on Rural Development, which stated that "planning policy should, as far as possible, facilitate people willing to settle in rural areas", while being sensitive to the need to protect "beauty spots", natural habitats and the rural environment.
What needs to be done, as the paper says, is to "disentangle the issue of urban-generated housing from the broader issue of how to breathe new life into the rural settlement structure" - for example, by introducing measures to unlock the potential of villages to satisfy "the legitimate ambitions of people seeking a rural lifestyle".