Analysis: The guidelines on rural housing will complete the suburbanisation of what's left of the countryside, writes Frank McDonald
Seven years ago, just before the 1997 general election, a strategy to achieve sustainable development in Ireland was published by the Government - and one of the important policies it contained was a presumption against granting permission for urban-generated housing in rural areas.
Not that most local authorities paid a blind bit of notice. They continued approving one-off houses on an almost indiscriminate basis, issuing permission for 85 per cent of all applications. It was only when some of their decisions were appealed by the likes of An Taisce that they ran into trouble.
The trouble was that An Bord Pleanála took sustainable development seriously and upheld An Taisce's appeals in 90 per cent of all cases - usually because of the risk of ground-water contamination from septic tanks, the creation of traffic hazards, or simply visual obtrusiveness.
It is important to emphasise that An Taisce has appealed only four out of every 1,000 planning decisions. What worried Ireland's bungalow builders and their supporters was its spectacular success rate on appeals and the fact that this was based on declared public policy.
The policy would just have to be changed, and that's what Mr Martin Cullen is doing. And though he has insisted that the new guidelines had been in gestation for some time, it is obvious that they were published yesterday so that he would get a hero's welcome at this weekend's Fianna Fáil ardfheis.
With local elections in June, the planners who drew up the guidelines also had to take account of the current political climate, which generally favours a liberal regime, while trying as best they could to hold the line on the official commitment to sustainable development.
Listening to some politicians, anyone might think that prospective bungalow-builders were facing draconian restrictions. Yet official figures show that one-off houses in rural areas account for at least one-third of the total output of housing annually, and up to 70 per cent in some counties.
This pattern of development is inherently unsustainable, not least because of car dependency. Narrow country roads colonised by housing are remote from public services, such as shops and schools, and dangerous - because of the absence of footpaths and lighting - for walking with a baby-buggy.
Ground-water contamination from a proliferation of septic tanks and other sewage treatment systems is also a major issue, which has been highlighted by the Environmental Protection Agency.
According to Mr Cullen, the rural housing guidelines will help to realise the regional development goal of the National Spatial Strategy. But this is a chimera, because building more houses in the countryside simply means that fewer will be built in the gateway and hub towns identified by the NSS.
In any case, the Government has effectively supplanted the NSS with its rabbit-out-of-a-hat decentralisation programme, under which 10,000 civil servants are to be moved out of Dublin to areas most of which were neither designated as gateways nor hubs.
The whole thrust of the new policy on rural housing is to facilitate rather than restrict it. Occupancy conditions are mentioned, but "roots" and "links" are so ill-defined that it amounts to an open season for the "Bungalow Blitz". One factor not mentioned in the guidelines is the huge vested interest in the sale of sites. It has been estimated that half-acre sites are selling for €45,000 on average and that farmers and other landowners could be making more than €800 million a year from such disposals.