BACK PAGES:Along with widespread emigration, another feature of the 1980s was what became known as "bungalow blight", a play on the title of a book of simple house designs, Bungalow Bliss, which some blamed for the spread of one-off housing in rural areas. In a series of articles, Environment Correspondent Frank McDonald characterised the development as a cancer which was infecting every part of the country.
THROUGHOUT THE length and breath of the country, rural areas are being destroyed relentlessly by this structural litter on the landscape – litter than can never be removed. And this cancer is so pervasive that for every private house built on a suburban housing estate, at least one other house is built in the middle of the countryside.
If this was Éamon de Valera’s dream of a country “bright with cosy homesteads”, it has turned into a nightmare.
Because what is happening, in effect, is that we are abandoning our towns and villages in favour of colonising the countryside. And this is still going on, almost day-in, day-out, in a year which has been designated by the Council of Europe for its European Campaign for the Countryside.
Figures compiled by Foras Forbartha illustrate the frightening spread of bungalow blight. They show that the output of “one-off” houses in rural areas doubled, from 5,530 to 11,050, between 1976 and 1983, and they now account for more than 53 per cent of all newly-built private houses compared to just 35 per cent 10 years ago.
It must be emphasised that these are national figures; if the major urban centres are excluded, the share of the total attributable to one-off houses would be much higher.
For example, in Monaghan, which would be a fairly typical rural county, one-offs now account for a staggering 80 per cent of all private house completions.
And the evidence is that much of this housing is, in fact, “urban-generated” – built for people who have no functional connection with agriculture. Most of them work in the nearest city or town, but they choose to live in a rural environment for status reasons or because they simply like the fresh air. In short, they are in the countryside, but not of the countryside.
The doctor, the solicitor, even the butcher and the dancehall owner, used to be quite happy with homes in town; now they have fantasies about Southfork-style ranch-houses. Indeed, one of the phenomena of modern Ireland is the proliferation of vast mansions faking Dallas or Dynasty on the outskirts of so many provincial towns – the palazzi gombeeni, as one Dublin architect has scathingly described them.
But if the countryside was populated only by those who depended on it for a living, many of the one-off houses – large or small – would not be there today. Indeed, Foras Forbartha reckons that more than half of the State’s rural population, or over 177,000 households, are not engaged in agricultural occupations. In other words, they are part of the uniquely Irish version of suburbanisation . . .
The loss of land, often some of the best in the country, can only be estimated. At an average of half-an-acre per house site, the 11,050 one-off bungalows built in 1983 alone would have consumed over 5,500 acres of land – the equivalent of one or two of the great estates which the Land Commission used to break up with such fervour for redistribution to needy smallholders.
At the same rate over a decade, more than 55,000 acres would be lost to agriculture. Yet the Department of Agriculture doled out more than £130 million over the past 10 years in grants to farmers for the reclamation of marginal land.
Farmers in financial difficulties are often put under pressure by the banks to seek planning permission for bungalows on their land, to strengthen the collateral for outstanding loans. But, one way or another, they make as much as £100 million a year in windfall gains through the sale of land for development, according to the 1985 Joint Oireachtas Committee on Building Land.
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