Just over 30 years ago, I wrote about the rampant suburbanisation of Ireland's countryside by "one-off" houses in a three-part series we called Bungalow Blitz – a play on the title of amateur architect Jack Fitzsimons' best-selling Bungalow Bliss, which had become the pattern book for those seeking to realise their dream of living in a rural area, removed from cities or towns.
The series was controversial, judging from the huge response it provoked. Many people in Dublin and other cities could see that the phenomenon of colonising the countryside with urban-generated housing was already getting out of hand, even in 1987. But there were others who branded it as a metropolitan assault on rural Ireland, a full-frontal attack on the “right” of people to build wherever they liked.
It’s not as if the proliferation of bungalows and larger homes we dubbed “palazzi gombeeni” came without any downsides for society. A report by An Foras Forbartha in 1976 highlighted the fact that the cost of providing public services – electricity, water, telecoms, postal deliveries, waste management and road maintenance – for dispersed rural housing was significantly higher than for homes in urban areas.
The report was so unacceptable to the political establishment that it was suppressed by then minister for local government Jimmy Tully (Labour). He had no problem ensuring his constituents in Co Meath got planning permissions to build houses in rural areas, against all planning advice, and defended these actions by saying that what he liked to see at night-time was "a light at the end of a country lane".
Struggling
Yet every urban-generated house in the countryside represents another nail in the coffin of struggling Irish towns and villages. That's one of the main reasons why Ireland 2040, the Government's draft national planning framework (NPF), has made it clear that "demonstrable economic need to live in a rural area" must be the "core consideration" to adjudicate on future planning applications for houses in the countryside.
Rural TDs have been lobbying hard to have any such restriction removed from the NPF. What’s driving this, of course, is an impetus to protect and prolong the long-established practice of “site farming”, whereby farmers can make huge windfall gains by selling off sites on the road frontages of their landholdings to whoever wants to buy them, often to raise extra funds for their sons or daughters to go to college.
So far, only the Green Party has insisted that the Government must not deviate from plans to restrict one-off rural housing under the NPF by yielding to the “persistent obsession” of many rural TDs to “secure a further easing of restrictions on one-off housing at a time when many rural areas are unable to cope with the infrastructure required to service individual properties” spread all over the countryside.
‘Fundamentally flawed’
Its spokesman on rural development, Kilkenny councillor Malcolm Noonan, said the era of unrestricted development of one-off housing in rural areas – which has produced as many as half a million such homes, each with its own septic tank – must come to an end.
“It has been a fundamentally flawed policy for decades that is not just anti-rural but has been a contributory factor in the decimation of our towns and villages.
“A continuation of expansion into rural Ireland will further erode the quality of the natural environment, see the removal of thousands of kilometres of hedgerows and do nothing for the economic viability of rural Ireland. The Government must hold firm on the NPF and ensure that our cities, towns and villages become growth centres to develop critical mass for sustainable development and resilient communities.”
Broadband rollout
The persistent delay in rolling out broadband is surely related to the inherently uneconomic cost of catering for widely dispersed rural housing, much of it owned and occupied by people who have nothing to do with farming, except that they bought sites from farmers. That’s why the latest effort to provide high-speed broadband to some half a million potential customers will require a public subsidy of €500 million.
The 2002 National Spatial Strategy was a an abject failure because it designated far too many "gateways" and "hubs", and was undermined by the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition's daft "decentralisation" programme, announced just 12 months later by then minister for finance Charlie McCreevy. That was a political stroke, which had nothing to do with promoting the elusive goal of "balanced regional development".
This time, we are told, it will be different. The Government’s latest plan, due for publication on Friday, envisages that the State’s population will increase by one million between now and 2040 and it proposes to accommodate 25 per cent of this growth in Dublin, 25 per cent in the “second-tier” cities of Cork, Limerick and Galway, and the remaining 50 per cent in “key regional centres, towns, villages and rural areas”.
Car dependency
In other words, there will be “something for everyone in the audience” yet again. But if the Government is serious about reducing the car dependency that’s part-and-parcel of dispersed housing, thereby cutting transport’s growing contribution to Ireland’s carbon emissions, it must stand up to the rural lobbyists and insist that anyone planning to build a new home in the countryside will have to demonstrate a genuine “housing need”.
Otherwise, it will leave the depopulation of towns and villages and the ruination of rural Ireland by our unique form of suburbanisation as its very dubious legacy.
Frank McDonald is former environment editor of The Irish Times