Steps are underway to reduce the requirement that anyone wanting to build a one-off house in Co Meath must have been living in the area for 10 years.
The 10-year rule is among the criteria for rural settlement in the recently-adopted Meath county development plan.
Yesterday councillors agreed at a council meeting to put on public display a variation to the plan which would see the requirement reduced to five years.
It was five years in the previous development plan and the chairman of the council, Nick Killian (FF), said some councillors were concerned about the 10-year rule. It is also a requirement that the applicant must not have owned a house in the past.
Letters from parish priests and school principals are being used to support the applicant's claim to be from the locality - but the need for such documents is also to be reviewed and standardised by the council later this year.
Other people who may meet the criteria are those originally from rural areas and who are in substandard or unacceptable housing situations and who have continuing close family ties with rural communities.
Returning emigrants who had lived for substantial parts of their lives in rural areas and had then moved abroad and now wish to return to reside near other family members, to work locally, to care for elderly members of their family or to retire are also included, as are people whose work is rurally based, such as national school teachers.
It appears that the elected members did not realise that the county development plan they adopted in March had doubled the residency rule to 10 years. The proposal to vary the new plan will go on public display next week.
Cllr Killian said he wanted the council to change the classification of the road between Skryne and Kilbride.
It is now listed as a regional road and as such all applications for one-off houses are automatically refused, he said.
At the same council meeting yesterday, county manager Tom Dowling outlined details of an imminent restructuring of the planning department primarily its centralisation in new premises in Navan.
Planning applications may still be lodged in any of the council's five local offices but they will all be sent to the new Navan office for validation.
The new offices are larger and in a more modern premises than the current planning office in county hall. The cramped conditions there have previously been blamed as contributing to the high turnover in planning staff.
Mr Dowling yesterday told the councillors: "We have to find a way of dealing with the turnover in staff."
He said the reorganisation of planning was necessary because at the moment "we are not able to monitor the quality of planning services because there are five different planning authorities in the county".