The Government's approach to housing in the countryside "amounts to an attempt to dismantle the planning system so carefully built up over the past number of years", according to the president of the Irish planning Institute (IPI).
Mr Iain Douglas said the new rural housing guidelines also "set out to override the interests of the common good and the principles of sustainable development where these conflict with the desire of individuals to build housing where they wish".
Speaking at the institute's a.g.m. yesterday, he said even the guideline's title, "Sustainable Rural Housing", was"extremely misleading" as it was clear that their purpose was to facilitate a more liberal approach.
There was "no empirical evidence" to justify this as the Department of the Environment's own figures showed an average of 75 per cent of applications for single rural houses were granted prior to the draft guidelines.
Mr Douglas said the Department should have been examining rural housing in the wider context of sustainable development - including the impact of up to 250,000 new, one-off houses in the next 20 years on both the countryside and urban areas.
"It is likely that the guidelines will lead to a significant acceleration in an already highly unsustainable pattern of urban-generated housing development in rural areas," he warned.
