Blanket ban on one-off housing in Northern Ireland announced
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I cannot believe that people have a problem with this. After driving around Cavan, Monaghan, Louth and Fermanagh over the last week, I can safel say that the nicest unspoilt area was Fermanagh. No miles and miles of uber-bungalows….
I’m all for it
Maybe this article might be of interest to some of you:
http://www.antaisce.org/campaigns/antaisce_articles/One-off%20Housing_James%20Nix_i.doc
@Rusty Cogs wrote:
That new (rubbish) movie with Andrea Corr set in Clare in the 60’s (The boys and girls of somewhere or other ?) was also made in both the Isle of Man and N. Ireland. Obviously the only places that look like Clare in the 60’s, including Clare.
I don’t think the countryside is that much drastically destroyed as yet ….I bet those movies were made in the Isle of man because of the cheaper tax breaks, cheaper costs etc………It was a cheap film.
Ken Boorman made Excalibur here 20 odd years ago in Wicklow and still after all those years the revisionist Walt Disney Arthur epic was only recently made here too as well as Lassie. There is still a bit of some unspoilt scenery.
With a boom and increase in population it is bound display some elements of civilization. We’ve never experienced this before. The last time there was such a building boom throughout the whole country I think it was the Normans who were responsible. Before that it was the mesolithics and neolithics.
Tighter planning laws just need to be applied on where and what to build regarding the countryside. Everyone should get on to their local rural TD’s and complain then. Where’s the mouthy Green Party when they’re needed.
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And do they genuinely destroy the scene? Are they truly that offensive that you would stop your car on a country road and go – damn, look at those white specks on the horizon – I bet you people live in those – how could they scar the environment in such a selfish manner. If you do, then you would be better off focussing on the road. Equally so, people would be better off cleaning out much of north-inner city Dublin – probably the greatest blight on the Irish landscape at this moment in time. Just because the population density means that a bus-route is viable doesn’t mean that such settlements are either socially or aesthetically desireable.
People are under a bit of a misinterpretation here about the development of the urban and rural landscape in Britain. The migration of people from the countryside to the cities in England was NEVER planned, nor was it even considered remotely desireable by many during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. The removal of human habitation from the British countryside was the direct result of industrial capitalism gone mad. That is a socio-historical fact. It had nothing to do with any form of environmental policy and that it is now considered to be environmentally preferential is a mere curiosity of the vagaries of human settlement history. For nearly two centuries the migration of people from the british countryside was bemoaned as the death of rural England (not its birth – as is being suggested with regard to Ireland). To ignore that fact is to present nothing more than a skewed picture of social reality and history. The vision of a depopulated rural England as something positive is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The rate at which one offs are being constructed varies across the country also, so some areas (like Clare and South Kerry) are much worse affected.
Quick point, landscapes change, even rural ones, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that we need to purposively slow the development of rural areas so they can be used solely as recreational facilities for urban dwellers. The idea that planners generally want to hold rural areas in suspended animation is not true (although some individuals may). Rather, the debate is calling for a balanced perspective on rural development and national policy imperatives. At the moment, the gloves are off and, in some counties, people are apparently allowed build what they want, where they want. In the long term, that is unsustainable, for a variety of obvious reasons.
Personally, I would have no problem with a limited amount of ‘one off’s being constructed, so long as very strict design criteria are met, and the numbers are kept to a minimum (the idea of a formal ‘link with the land’ and a ban on resale or letting of the property for say 5-10 years is a good one). The real focus of rural development should be on the creation of vibrant villages and towns however, with appropriate levels of services. Cork country council have done some very good work in this regard (even if some of the one off housing decisions are puzzling), with the tax incentive schemes for ‘ring towns’ in the harbour area. As a policy, it works, and delivers significant benefits. Other local authorities have a lot to answer for in this regard.
@PDLL wrote:
And do they genuinely destroy the scene? Are they truly that offensive that you would stop your car on a country road and go – damn, look at those white specks on the horizon
They’re only specks because they are far away in that picture :rolleyes:
I agree with Aidan on this the resources should be concentrated on supporting existing villages and providing sufficient support to develop them into vibrant magnets for those already in the hinterlands. Cork Co Co have done some very good work in recent years and it is one County where there appears to be relative order in terms of defining what is and isn’t acceptable.
Ultimately I am against a total ban but the current free for all if sustained will leave Ireland with an infrastructural deficet that will take centuries to solve. When even a Healey Rae is compalining about ‘blow ins’ buying sites the writing is on the wall.
There was an hilarious report on Nationwide during the week about a tradesman father building a house for his son – I dearly hope most people here weren’t watching for fear of a wave of heart failure rippling across the country. What exactly the point of the report was I haven’t quite figured out as yet, but it was so funny as to almost come across as a send-up of the one-off phenomenon. The subjects were the most perfect caricatures.
The house they were building was sited half way up a lightly sloping field, utterly devoid of so much as a twig of foliage, two storeys in height and ‘traditional’ in character, replete with PVC windows featuring plastic arches as a ‘decorative motif’, and a plastic conservatory. Everything that wasn’t plastic was concrete – there was barely a splinter of timber in the edifice outside of the roof trusses. The walls were concrete, the foundations were concrete, the floors and ceilings were concrete – even the staircase was cast concrete.
They then give a tour of the soon-to-be ‘luxury’ interior, with “the underfloor heating” and “the walk-in wardrobe” and “the kitchen yonits along here”.
And cringe-inducingly rounded off with the (apparent farmer) father-in-law who donated the ‘site’ saying “we hope the rest of the family will need sites; we can give them the sites. I have the land to provide them with sites and I think it’s a good thing they stay around, besides paying the money of €60-€100,000 for a site and then build on it – costly job building a house, to have to buy the site like”.Indeed.
Here it is below. Viewers should note this report contains distressing images from the very start:
@Graham Hickey wrote:
Viewers should note this report contains distressing images from the very start
😀 Best laugh I’ve had all weekend. Thanks G.
Yup- I saw the item. I can just see the report in the papers: ‘A mystery illness hit built environment professonals and interested laypeople at 7.20 on Wednesday last. Doctors reported a surge of heart murmurs, palpitations and blood pressure complaints in surgeries and hospitals all over the country. When asked what the cause was, patients were unable to speak, their faces frozen with shock.’
I think the report was about father-son bonding. I was watching it with my father and we bonded with laughter.
Bah! I want to see that now, but I don’t seem to have the right software (what do you open it in?).
A bit of visual fill-in for the thread:
.They look very familiar Devin – no idea where they are, but I can show you hundred of ‘developments’ very like that one …
Question.
Is there a correlation between the size and population on the catchment area of local authorities and their ability to plan properly, or is it just plain politics?
Given that Cork CoCo is one of the larger in the state, and that it works very well with the City Council in terms of planning, is it really surprising that, given the total population is around 490,000, they are a relatively strong body? Is there an instituitional critical mass that smaller local authorities cannot muster? If so, is there an argument for reform of local government along super authority line, amalgamating smaller CoCos into joint bodies with single planning areas?
Even in the case of Dublin, is there an argument for having a single planning body covering the entire GDA, out to Greystones, Dundalk, Naas and Maynooth?
@Devin wrote:
Bah! I want to see that now, but I don’t seem to have the right software (what do you open it in?).
When I click the link it opens automatically in Real Player.
Are those houses in Waterford- the coast road heading west out of Tramore? They look quite familiar to me. Though as Aidan says, they could be anywhere.
Except Northern Ireland, obviously.:)
Aidan-
There are Regional Authorities, but they have no legislative backing. Each authority has Regional Planning Guidelines, but they tend to be cited only where it suits developers in their applications, and because they aren’t legally binding it’s difficult for the local authority to use them to refuse an application. One change I’d like to see is these Regional Planning Guidelines becoming binding and the Authorities becoming proper authorities with full planning powers.My own feelings are that it’s a mix of size and politics- the smaller the area the more likely it is that the decision maker will be known to the applicant. One of the reasons larger authorities are perceived to be better is that they have both the necessary distance from their clients and the back up of a balanced and reasonably well staffed department.
There are Regional Authorities
As far as I can tell, the only thing these ‘Authorities’ are actually used for is as additional subheads in statisical publications.
My take is that it is the both the institutional strength of the planning body (both in terms of the number and quality of planning staff, and the abilities of management) and the relative strength of officials vis politicians operating at a local and national level.
@Aidan wrote:
They look very familiar Devin – no idea where they are, but I can show you hundred of ‘developments’ very like that one …
@Aidan wrote:
Are those houses in Waterford- the coast road heading west out of Tramore? They look quite familiar to me. Though as Aidan says, they could be anywhere.
Well that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s the same scene everywhere! As it happens they’re from a trip I took the summer before last, starting at Portlaoise, through Laois, Kildare and ending up in west Wicklow. It was a gorgeous late-summer day, the countryside was ravishing, but it was just non-stop bungalows … stark ones plonked everywhere … new ones being built … it just became funny after a while, thinking: How could we screw up a land so comprehensively and in so short a time?
… And you have the guy on the Irish Times letters page yesterday attacking the new rule for NI as being against ‘the tradition in the 32 counties…to live in the open countryside’.
I just don’t know …… it’s a weird time to be around.@PDLL wrote:
In short, there should be regulations stating that a single person should only have a 1.1 3 door car, a family should be allowed a 1.5 5 door car and so on..
In the days when the only Tiger economy was the Asian one, Singapore was said to have a 1,2,3,4,5, economy.
One wife,
two kids,
three bed house,
four good wheels and a high
five figure salary to pay for it all
KB2With one of the highest densities in the World and the strictist regulation of the private motor car;
they also introduced the Worlds largest automated underground railway in 2004; it seems the good times are still rolling for them as a result of their disciplined planning regime.
From the Irish Times on Friday. Haven’t been in the direction of Leitrim / Cavan in a few years. Is it really this bad? I suppose it’s totally unsurprising:
THE ARTS: WITNESS TO ATROCITY
Alfredo Jaar’s artistic interventions have taken him from his native Chile to Bosnia, Rwanda and Sweden – but his concern now is with what’s happening to the Leitrim landscape, he tells Belinda McKeon
Friday, December 7, 2007
…… A PLACE’S ESSENCE, he argues, is not just physical, not just about measurements and logistics and planning regulations. “Any place is a political place, it’s a cultural space, it’s a landscape,” he says. “It is many, many things. So the architect analyses that, and proposes something that fits so well to that place, that is unique to that place, that responds to the history of that place, to the landscape, to the beauty of the place. And then, when you discover that essence, you can make a proposal.”
He pauses, looks almost pained. “And that’s what shocked me in Leitrim.”
Leitrim? Yes, Leitrim. Tijuana, Catia, Fukuroi, Mälmo, Kwangju, and now Leitrim. Leitrim and Roscommon, to be more precise; for these are the two places which have been on Jaar’s mind over the past year, as he has led a residency with five artists from the area.
…… All five artists will focus on the badly planned and barely designed property development which has run riot over the Leitrim/Roscommon countryside in the last five years.
“The new constructions you see in Leitrim are just appalling,” says Jaar. “They do not correspond to that extraordinary landscape.”
They fail abysmally to connect with the essence of the place, he says, “yet people still buy these places. Because they are looking at them only as an investment. It’s as if architecture and development has become like money.”
Jaar’s tone is genuinely baffled at this point. What has happened, so quickly, in Ireland, is “unbelievable”, he says. He has seen it elsewhere, but it is vastly more “visible” in “such a beautiful country, so small”.
As an architect, how might he characterise the kinds of developments that are springing up like ragwort in villages across these counties?
“Ooh la la,” he says, wincing. “What ugly but diplomatic word can I use?” He sighs. “Let’s say it in another way. The developers are not enlightened. They think that the only way to make money is by building the cheapest and quickest and . . . I just think these developers are making a huge mistake. I think that good architecture is also valuable, and also pays. And it lasts.”
ON THE QUALITY of new Irish housing developments, Jaar uses other words, not especially harsh words, but words he asks me not to quote all the same. In the speech he’ll deliver at Trade, he warns about the dangers of landscape “deteriorating into parody” – strong words. He’s excited about the “aesthetic intelligence” of the five local artists who are making work around the subject of property development, but he seems wary of saying too much on the subject himself, wary of overstepping some mark of propriety.
Jaar has also been asked by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority to make a temporary intervention next summer, but he feels “the same kind of disgust” at the rapid and underplanned development in that area, so he is still deciding “whether an intervention in that context is worth it”. He likes his interventions to have some chance of making a difference, he says.
Dictatorship, genocide, famine, xenophobia, injustice – Jaar’s work has squared up to it all. But he’d never seen an Irish property development before. It obviously takes some beating.
The Trade seminar takes place at King House, Boyle, Co Roscommon, today and tomorrow. Further details: http://www.roscommonarts.com
© 2007 The Irish Times
I think the ban is ridiculous, and bad news for architects.
Most of the best examples of rural architecture throughout history, have been one off houses.A better plan would be to designate specific areas of outstanding natural beauty, for preservation, rather than telling people what they can and can’t do on their own property.
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