Reply To: Coup d’Etat in An Taisce?

Fin said: “on prime time last night a big discussion on an taisce”

Get your act together Fin!! Thursday’s Prime Time was a special on one-off housing, featuring a report, followed by a studio discussion with a panel of six people, one of whom was from An Taisce.

Yes, the usual bungalow defenders (O’Cuiv, Caulfield) didnt come off very well this time. They tried the usual tactics against An Taisce, attacking “its” policies, but Frank Corcoran just calmly and clearly reiterated that An T. simply apply Government policy (contained in the National Spatial Strategy) and that – he was trying to get this in but Miriam O’Callaghan kept talking over him – Government policy is in turn based on European environmental legislation that Ireland has signed up to.

Rachael Kenny (former IPI president) is now a senior planner in Meath County Council so she probably wasn’t the best person to be there for obvious reasons (you can be sure she was told what she can and can’t say).

Emer O’Siochru (somebody described as a hippy) is a well-respected architect who’s been working in the area of built heritage for many years.

As for that guy from ‘Council for the West’ (another IRDA by the sound of things), what can you say? There’s no problem with what’s happening to the countryside as far as these people are concerned, and the already lax rules on the plonking of large pattern-book bungalows everywhere should be completely relaxed.

I wonder if he saw the piece in the Irish Independent on the 2nd of Janary titled ‘Top composer decries new plans to allow one-off houses’?

It said:

‘Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has a home in this country, has criticised government plans which will allow thousands of one-off houses to be built in the countryside.

The composer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera told the Irish Independent that Ireland’s landscape was already marred by some of the most “hideous and inappropriate housing anywhere in the world” and that he was “gobsmacked” that regulations would be changed to allow thousands of one-off houses to be built.

Mr Llyod Webber said he realised there were few things more infuriating than “some outsider pontificating about the affairs of another country. But I plead a huge affection for Ireland and it grieves me to see such a special landscape besmirched by houses that have absolutely no sympathy for local vernacular architecture whatsoever”, he said yesterday……’