Remember the date: March 3rd, 2004, the day the death sentence was pronounced upon the green fields of Ireland. Remember the man who placed the black cap on his head: Martin Cullen. Remember his improbable accomplice: Bernard Allen, "Opposition" spokesman on the environment, as the Irish countryside, head bowed, was led from the court, to await the blade and the block, writes Kevin Myers
It's one of the reassuring falsehoods of modern Ireland that because things are good now, they will remain good indefinitely. To look at the longer-term consequences of any policy is to be élitist and selfish. Short-termism is our god: short-termism triumphs over all; short-termism is the axe glistening in the executioner's shed.
Admittedly, many who have campaigned against the bungling bungalisation of our countryside were city-dwellers who could be infuriatingly condescending towards rural values. An Taisce came to mean anti-everything country. Supercilious disdain was preferred to explanation and encouragement, though the one thing you should never do to Irish farmers is patronise them.
Instead of An Taisce, we now have An Carte Blanche, as outlined by the Minister for the Environment: "These new guidelines are based on a presumption that people who have roots in or links to rural areas, and are part of and contribute to the rural community, will get planning permission for houses." Roots in, links to: these are the barn doors swinging open wide to allow just about anyone whatsoever to build a house where they like.
Caveats are rich in the disingenuous piety of populist politicians courting votes at election time: "New houses in rural areas should, of course, be located and designed to integrate well with their physical surroundings and be generally compatible with the conservation of sensitive areas such as habitats." Bah. Humbug. Fiddlesticks. He could have been speaking Persian for all the meaning those words actually have: "integrate", "compatible", "sensitive" and, most especially, "habitats". Does the Minister really believe there are special places in the countryside marked "habitat", which are distinctive from the non-habitats around them? Actually, he possibly does: he is, after all, Minister for the Environment, a position which obliges him to know as much about the environment, including habitats, as a Mali peasant knows about Saturn's moons.
He is in reality Minister for Planning Permissions, and on Thursday last he filled the hold of his Department's Lockheed C 130 Hercules with thousands of bits of paper marked "approved". The Herc. will soon be flying across Ireland, bombarding the countryside with approvals. And wherever a piece of paper falls, a house will grow. We are looking at the creation of an environmental and visual catastrophe; but since it is presumed to be in the distant future, we feel we may safely ignore it.
What is not in the distant future is the effect of this on land prices. From March 4th, agricultural land with a road frontage effectively ceased to exist. All land will now be valued as if it were half-acre parcels with planning permission already granted. In which case: why bother farming? Agriculture is what you do with land while waiting for the builders to move in.
Alongside the cant with which the Minister wrapped his announcement was the justification both he and Mary Hanafin parroted constantly, and on which they were barely challenged in RTÉ interviews: you can imagine the ministerial advisers briefing them as they went into studio. The provision for easier planning permissions, they declared, was necessary "to halt rural decline".
Well, "rural decline", like Communism, once used to be blamed for everything, and any measure which would reverse it was lauded. Sorry, but that's no longer good enough. There is no rural decline: indeed, quite the reverse. Our countryside is prospering as never before, and though there might have been a drop in farmers' incomes, the modern rural economy is complex and diverse and is no longer based on agriculture alone.
A thriving countryside must have controls, just as burgeoning cities have controls. Since the poverty which once limited our ability to indulge in irreversible folly has vanished, political will must take its place. On March 4th, Minister Cullen decided that political will would so do no such thing. Out went the bath-water. Out went the baby.
There is no natural right to live in the area you were raised in. None. There never has been, and it is fantasy to insist that there should be such a right today. No one maintains that, because you were raised in Killiney, the State should therefore enact whatever provisions are necessary for you to set up home there. Why should the countryside be different? Take one rural family farm, with five children: when they are grown, five new houses. The parents die, their house becomes a tax-free cash crop, and so is sold on. The five offspring have three children each. Fifteen new houses, meaning 21 houses in all. Potentially every single house in the Irish countryside could within two generations be the seedbed for a score of new houses, and rural Ireland becomes Oklahoma City, a vast extended suburb of half-acre lots.
With this difference. Oklahoma City has sewerage, water mains, highways. Rural Ireland has not. We pump water from wells and we dispose of our waste in septic tanks. With rural suburbanisation, our water-tables will in time be underground e-coli paradises, our country-lanes speedways for parents getting their children to school before rushing to work. Houses and ESB cables everywhere, our scenery despoiled, and bungalow blitz back with a vengeance. Hallelujah! And every hill and valley shall be assaulted.