Reply To: Bungalow Dilemma

The idea of compulsory purchase of land makes emminent sense but a lot of the motivation behind one off housing is the selling of sites by farmers, it’s a small industry now. Where people live in rural Ireland is goverend by which farmer sells the most sites. Don’t think farmers & country people in really appreciate being told to cluster. There has to be more emphasis on design, even if native hedgerows and hardwood trees were planted, the houses would blend into countyrside a bit better.

Can’t help thinking that an Taisce’s preachiness has alienated people. They haven’t really outlined how they see villages developing. Same opinion in Sunday Time’s article below…..

Comment: Liam Fay: Planning snobs are strangling rural life

You can buy almost anything on a Dublin building site. Drugs, booze, sex toys, jewellery, you name it — all you have to do is find the right guy and place your order. Over the years, the capital’s larger construction sites have grown into sophisticated, self-contained civilisations, complete with their own laws, customs and internal black markets.
There’s a site on the southside where the on-campus merchants are so efficient that they’ve printed up catalogues from which their customers can reserve merchandise for delivery. Right now, the biggest seller among its workers is Viagra, the male impotency pill, which is being dispensed with reckless abandon.

Naturally, this is a facet of the building industry one never hears about, from either employers’ representative bodies or building worker unions. But then, a great deal of what is said publicly about the construction game bears little resemblance to reality as experienced by those who ply their trades in hard hats.

A similar air of unreality surrounds the public representation of the rural planning process, a system which has also evolved a complex, sovereign culture of its own. It’s a world whose logic appears to make perfect sense to insiders but is impenetrable to everybody else.

Though charged with implementing uniform government policy, local authority planners are frequently laws unto themselves. The decisions they take often display little evident consistency or discernible rationale.

Attempting to decode the thinking of council planners is one of rural Ireland’s few thriving industries. This impossible task isn’t made any easier by the imperious and secretive attitudes of many planning officials. Or the fact that most county development plans are harder to read than Finnegan’s Wake.

However, the most controversial feature of the rural planning process is the role played by environmental and conservation agencies, most notably An Taisce — the National Trust for Ireland.

Under the planning acts, local authorities are obliged to consult An Taisce on sensitive development proposals. The organisation has a statutory right to appeal the granting of individual planning permissions which are then adjudicated upon by An Bord Pleanala. It’s a right which most country-dwellers believe is being exercised with undue vigour — not least because the planning board upholds the overwhelming majority of such appeals.

While An Taisce’s objections to rural developments appear to be the product of high-minded environmental concerns — about ground-water contamination, say, or the protection of heritage sites — there is a clear cultural component to their interventions which is never acknowledged, namely an absurdly romanticised view of the countryside as a pastoral idyll in which human intrusion must be kept to an absolute minimum.

Many of these environmentalists are driven by a supercilious and often ideological distaste for what they regard as the crude tastes and tacky aspirations of unsophisticated rural folk. The countryside, they seem to believe, is wasted on the countrified.

Congenitally thick though we are said to be, most rural people understand full well that there is all sorts of extraneous stuff (social envy, snobbery, even class war) mixed in with the ecological arguments propounded by An Taisce and their ilk.

Witness the snooty disdain evidenced by many environmentalists for what are sourly described as the “ostentatious mansions” and “Southfork villas” which supposedly litter the rural skyline, or the condescension with which more modest country homes are dismissed as part of a “bungalow blitz” -— as though the very term “bungalow” were an insult.

Farmers and other rural residents deeply resent the implication that they are unfit to act as custodians of the land on which they live. They become apoplectic when they learn that plans by their son or daughter to build a house on family property have been thwarted, essentially on the say-so of a blow-in or day-tripper.

Hence, the steaming cauldron of resentment and frustration which has been fermenting in rural areas for a decade has spilled over into every aspect of what has become a poisonously divisive debate.

This is why the draft guidelines on “Sustainable Rural Housing” outlined this week by Martin Cullen, the environment minister, are to be welcomed, if only because they bring a degree of clarity and consistency to an arena that’s been blighted by confusion and caprice.

The supporting walls of the guidelines are proposals which, it is claimed, will make it easier for people with rural connections, either by birth or through work, to build one-off houses in the countryside.

The timing of the publication of Cullen’s draft policy — days before the Fianna Fail ard fheis and weeks before the local elections — was obviously politically motivated. In truth, however, the government had little option but to take action in favour of those who wish to build homes in the country, such is the intensity of feeling about this issue throughout the provinces.

If the proposed loosening of planning restrictions results in the construction of more ill-considered ribbon developments and a rash of unsustainable one-off housing in some rural areas, the environmental lobby in general and An Taisce in particular will have nobody to blame but themselves.

The organisation adopted such a relentlessly haughty and antagonistic approach in its guise as planning watchdog that it effectively guaranteed a civic and governmental backlash, in which the baby could well be thrown out with the bathwater.

Thrilled giddy by its perception of itself as the sole protector of the Irish natural world, An Taisce has on occasions acted without evident consideration for the lives of people who reside in the country. While there are fanatics on both sides of this debate, there is nothing to equal the preening arrogance of sanctimonious conservationists.

It’s an arrogance neatly exemplified on radio last week by Ciaran Cuffe, the Green party’s planning spokesman and An Taisce member. “We’ve got to look very carefully at who should be living in the countryside,” declared Cuffe.

Who is this “we” of whom he speaks? And when were they divinely endowed with the power to decide where people should be permitted to live? Groups such as An Taisce, and their fellow rainbow warriors, must eventually realise that they are part of Irish society, not its guardians or overlords. Until they do, their self-appointed crusades are doomed to end in humiliating defeat.

Like Dublin building sites and the rural planning process, the countryside is a highly evolved social order with its own rules, traditions and defence mechanisms. The big difference is that this is a civilisation which has survived for thousands of years. Outsiders who would try to dictate to its inhabitants do so at their peril.