What is truly depressing about the decision of several county councils to try to ban outsiders from building in the areas they control is not that such a move is illegal and will cost the county council which tries to enforce it a fortune in compensation costs. No; it is that when local authorities have finally shown some muscle in the matter of housing, they dodge the real issues - the ones they've had power over for years: what and where.
The failure of every single county council in Ireland to create and enforce a common aesthetic for house design is rapidly turning much of Ireland into a visual catastrophe. When John Kelleher made the film Eat the Peach in 1986, he used a vast neo-Georgian house in Meath as the deeply risible, hideously visible abode of a gombeen man. The house, it seemed, to say it all: back then, that particular dwelling seemed a by-word for bad taste.
Monstrous heaps
Not any more. By the standards of what was to follow, that building is a model of architectural discipline, intellectual rigour and aesthetic integrity. Monstrous heaps have been erected in every county since then, huge structural declarations of the swaggering and boastful vulgarity of the disposable wealth of the owners.
Simultaneously, at the other end of the market, the multicultural Lego-bungalow replaced the indigenous dwelling house almost totally. What has been almost devastatingly certain about the thousands of such houses which have erupted over the country like acne is that they are seldom or never driven by a single aesthetic: houses were assembled from a Lego block of Spanish beach-houses, another Lego block of Georgian Ireland, another Lego block of Victorian London, another Lego block of Tudor Englande. Concrete balustrades became the pre-eminent feature of every garden; and north-facing walls were given balconies whose sole purpose was to be seen from the road.
During these two decades of construction, I am unaware of a single planning officer in the entire country publicly calling for modesty, restraint, or vernacular integrity in the building of houses; "anything goes" was the watchword, and sure enough, everything went. The folly reached burlesque proportions when the Government introduced tax incentives for building holiday homes in the most beautiful parts of Ireland.
This was State-subsidised cretinism, and last week BBC Northern Ireland's Home Truths programme revealed what the policy has done to Donegal, aided - needless to say - by bizarre, inexplicable and certainly inexcusable decisions by local officials. Hundreds of seldom-used holiday homes, of invariably preposterous design, now cluster around every scenic spot in the county like animals at a watering hole. Ready-made ghost towns were being created even as the usual bungalow-it is spread across the countryside like smallpox, turning Bloody Foreland into Bloody Legoland.
Unspoken consensus
The aesthetic and environmental inertia of the planning authorities in Donegal and elsewhere probably reflects an unspoken consensus throughout Ireland as a whole: we want to wreck the countryside - only now, certain county councils prefer that locals are given a monopoly over the wrecking. This - informally, and unspokenly - has been the way over large tracts of the country for years. Locals built their higgledy-piggledy, hey-nonny-no, yer durn tootin' Gorrgian haciendas wherever they wanted. But now prosperity has brought unprecedented mobility, and clearly many people feel driven by a missionary zeal to spread their particular brand of bad taste away from their own home to pastures new.
Perhaps it is understandable that county councils wish to protect the locals' ancient and inalienable rights to vandalise the environment, but to do so at the expense of those who would wish to join in the sport from outside is illegal within European law.
Article 15 (sub-section p, paragraph iii) of the Maastricht Treaty states that no member state may discriminate against the rights of any citizen of any member state, including its own, to wreck, vandalise, ruin, despoil or ravage the landscape of said member state by the creation of a Pandora's Box of vulgarity if that member state of the first part not merely allows some of its own citizens to do same, but in certain circumstances actually encourages them to do so.
And did we not have equality laws embraced in full by the our now passionately politically correct Oireachtas? Is it not now illegal to discriminate against anyone because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nose-size, shape of teeth, colour of underwear, length of fingernails, and most of all, county of birth? County managers: don't try it. It'll end in tears.
Enforce rules
Try something else. Try imposing aesthetic standards like those in many other countries - Switzerland, France, Denmark, Britain. Make planning permissions - and people will need them; we can't all live in ditches - dependent on inconspicuousness and sensitivity to the environment. And enforce your rules. No more balustrades; no panorama windows. Ban palazze gombini, and enforce broadleaf tree plantings.
Our countryside can take many more homes, and people won't mind if they're built with restraint and regard for the place where they will stand for the next hundred years. But do I believe that local officials will do anything at all to curb the hideous blight randomly pock-marking the country like bombs from B52s? You're not sure?
Okay, try this one: do I believe that Pope JPII is a Zulu transsexual called Mabel O'Malley? Same answer.