Restricting the number of houses in rural Ireland to those that exist at the moment would "guarantee a rapid decline in population" in those areas of up to 20 per cent in as many years, Mr Eamon O'Cuiv, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, told a special meeting of Kerry County Council.
The Minister's "vision of rural development" was one of dispersed settlement, where people from the areas worked and lived, some in nearby towns as well as in their own communities.
"My vision of rural Ireland is a populated countryside in the tradition of dispersed townland where people have a sense of place," he outlined last Friday. "It's an absolute distortion of the truth to think that all people living outside villages and towns are farmers," Mr O'Cuiv said.
To the naked eye, these traditional settlement patterns of a crossroads and a church with a small school seemed just a scattering of dwellings. However, they had ancient origins.
"The hierarchy of settlement based on the townland that has served us so well socially and economically is worth preserving," Mr O'Cuiv said.
But that did not mean he was for a laissez-faire attitude towards building in the countryside or that he agreed with the selling of sites to solve economic problems.
In his trip so far of 22 islands and around the coastal areas, it seemed that every house was built along a roadside, he said.
"Planning guidelines which encouraged road frontage are unsympathetic to the landscape. Instead, people should be encouraged to set their houses back into the natural undulations," Mr O'Cuiv advised.
And Mr O'Cuiv had this peace offering to An Taisce (earlier this year, it had called on Mr O'Cuiv to resign because he criticised An Taisce for seeking to stop the building of one-off houses in the countryside): "I have had my jousts with An Taisce. But I want to put it on the record, An Taisce have not objected to valid family applications and claims in my constituency in Galway."
"I'm about settlement patterns, not about handing bucks out to people," he told members of Kerry County Council. "Selling sites is not the permanent solution for economic problems. It's a very temporary solution," he said in response to members who said farmers should be allowed get planning permission and sell their sites to buoy up falling income.
The worst of scenarios had been created by putting the services into towns and attempting to force people into towns, cities and villages. A balance would have to be struck between depopulated rural areas and crowded urban centres, Mr O'Cuiv said.