Eoghan Harris on one-off housing

One-offish enough?

You wrote as some kind of justification for one-off house in Switzerland:
‘CH has always been built around traditional agricultural settlements in the valley floors supported by rich alluvial deposits from its glacial landscape’

Allow me to re-phrase that just a little:

‘Ireland has always been built around traditional agricultural settlements in its coastal areas supported by rich coastal resources from its Atlantic landscape’

I presume therefore that this justifies the building of one-offs around our coast. Is the debate over?

@Thomond Park wrote:

Traditional development patterns in Irelnad pre 1970 rarely touched the coast with the exception of lighthouses for climatic reasons excluding natural harbours such as Kinslae and Clifden.

Your ready jump appears not only premature but also misinformed

Have you forgotten Galway? I suppose that is why at a guess about 80% of the population has settled within a few miles of the sea or a major inlet (?) Irish people have since the very beginning of human settlement on the island settled near or on the coast – have a look at the landscape of the Knocknarea peninsula in Sligo. My knowledge of Irish georgraphy, archaeology and history must be profoundly worse than I ever imagined, as indeed must my eyesight.

The debate may not be over, but it has taken some serious deviations from logic.

@PDLL wrote:

Have you forgotten Galway?

My family originate from about 2kms from Galway city] I suppose that is why at a guess about 80% of the population has settled within a few miles of the sea or a major inlet (?) Irish people have since the very beginning of human settlement on the island settled near or on the coast – [/QUOTE]

This is as outlined above and historical OS records a very new phenomenum

@PDLL wrote:

have a look at the landscape of the Knocknarea peninsula in Sligo. My knowledge of Irish georgraphy, archaeology and history must be profoundly worse than I ever imagined, as indeed must my eyesight.

The debate may not be over, but it has taken some serious deviations from logic.

The peninsula you refer to has its most significant archaeological features on raised ground the ancient chieftans wanted immortality and were quite risk adverse when it came to climatic risk

@jimg wrote:

Your defence of once-off housing on the basis that it represents what tourists want to see in Ireland is ludicrous

I thought I had cleared this one up – I NEVER said that tourists come to Ireland to see one off houses. I said that they came to see cottages as that is an element of the stereotypical image of Ireland which many tourists have and wish to see. I said that they often STAY in one-off houses serving as B&Bs. Mind you, since cottages are the one-off houses of the 19th century, then maybe they do actually come to see one-off houses, but I have a feeling you won’t see it this way.

@Thomand Park wrote:

the resources that sustained the clan came from Lough Corrib]

This has to be a first – was the sea marginal to the lives of Galway people over the centuries? Doubtful. Why was it such a successful trading port in the medieval period? If Lough Corrib was so important why then did Galway develop on the sea and not further up the lake. Must have been because getting those ships from Spain down the lake would have been a bit tricky. Galway developed on the sea because it was a port first and foremost – it needed the sea – to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.

@Thomand Park wrote:

This is as outlined above and historical OS records a very new phenomenum

Not sure what this means: does it mean that settlement beside the coast is a new phenomenon or that the OS records that settlement is now moving away from the coast?

Both would be wrong in my understanding of Irish demographics. The Irish population has always been focused on the coast – Athlone is about the only town of any size in the midlands and even it is based on our longest river. The population continues to move steadily towards the coast as this is where effectively all of our urban centres are located. I am a bit surprised that an Irish person would disagree with the idea that we have always been and continue to be a nation of largely coastal settlements. With arguments like this, it hardly raises confidence in me with regard to the legitimacy of your arguments against one-off houses!

@Thomand Park wrote:

The peninsula you refer to has its most significant archaeological features on raised ground the ancient chieftans wanted immortality and were quite risk adverse when it came to climatic risk

Most of the archaeological features on Knocknarea peninsula are on slightly raised ground are than lies in the middle of the peninsula – ALL of these monuments are within a 60 minute walk (5-10 minute drive) of the coast. It is a well established fact that whatever community existed in the area during the Neolithic period survived by exploiting the sea. If you walk along the beaches of that peninsula you will see a huge number of midden shell sites (some 2m deep) where the local population gathered and processed/ate shell fish. The reason that the community settled in this area is because of the sea – the gentle rise of ground that the majority of the monuments stand on proffers NO protection from the elements, other than from a high tide.

Graham – indeed, it does beggar belief that someone could construct a mock Grecian Temple is such a location. It is completely out of context – well nigh an obscenity. The two bungalows, however, DO have an historical context. I wonder would your tourist companions have been so horrified if there had been two nice little crannogs nestled on the waters-edge or two nice little thatched cottages. I’m sure that their digital cameras would have been hopping with excitement. Odd that, both crannogs and cottages were the one-off settlements of their time as indeed these two bungalows are of our time. They HAVE an historical context within Irish cultural history. They may not be as pretty as a Swiss chalet or an artisan’s house in Bruge, but they ARE rooted in a cultural context. It may take you two hundred years to see theat – I hope you live long enough to realize what I am getting at. Oddly enough, Ireland was NEVER an urban land, nor were the Celts an urban race – urbanism is a recent phenomenon in Ireland (really only since the 1970s in any really significant sense, although I know we have had cities and towns since much earlier). So if we are talking about who comes first in the historical precedent stakes, you will have to face up to the fact that it is the one-off settlement.

Your comment that:

‘The pattern and scale of one-off development today is not in the slightest rooted in historical precedent and should not be sustained’

is, in my opinion, laughable. It shows no understanding of the cultural and historical context of settlement development in Ireland and displays a lack of sensitivity to the way in which the country and its people have developed over the last 10,000 years which is singularly deficient. Contrary to what you have written, Ireland has always been a nation of one-off settlers – the minority choosing to settle in towns only when exposed to the influence of foreign invaders such as the Vikings and the Anglo-Normans.

To support this assertion, lets look at the historical precedent:

– over 60,000 ringforts are still extant in this country. How many countless thousands have been destroyed through agriculture or have simply faded into the landscape – we will never know. Regardless, the figures reflect a large number of one-off settlements even from early times.
– – lets consider one-off cottages during the immediate pre-famine period. With a population of 8,000,000, there must have been quite a number of one-offs. Lets conjecture. Of that 8m, I would guess about .5m lived in Dublin and the other cities and towns. That leaves about 7.5 million living in houses dotted around the country. Lets take an average of about 10 people per house. That gives us a guestimate of about 750,000 one-off houses. Not bad. Sounds like grounds for historical precedent to me. If there is a historian out there, maybe they could offer more accurate estimates.

The fact of the matter is that some people have a vision of Ireland that is comprised of Dublin, the great sprawling metropolis, and the other regional and token gateway cities. In between – a green swathe of weekend leisure land – a vacant nature reserve that serves no other function than to allow the urbane urbanites to don their Alpine Low hiking boots and to ‘get out there’ into the wild west so that they can bond with nature before returning to the big smoke. Of course, they are only too glad to get back into their SUVs as who would really want to live ‘out there’ in the shitty windy winter months. Oddly enough, many do want to live ‘out there’ – many do want to live in parts of the country that have been settled from the earliest times of human settlement in Ireland, many do want to continue the tradition of living near to nature. Yes, the decline and alteration of the agricultural industry has meant that many of those one-off settlers no longer ‘toil the land’ but rather fund their existences in other ways. Nothing new there. When the first settlers arrived in Ireland there was no agricultural industry either (in fact, there wasn’t even the concept of agriculture)– many lived off what the sea offered. That did not de-legitimise their living in one-off houses. In that context, living in one-offs is as traditional as bacon and cabbage, Irish dancing and the bodhran. What is alien to Irish culture is living in cities and perhaps that is why we seem to be incapable of effective town planning.

In effect, therefore, there are a number of reasons that one-offs should remain an integral element of Irish society – they are a continuation of our well-established pre-Anglo cultural settlement patterns, they offer people a valid and worthwhile alternative to urban life and the manifold social and infrastructural problems associated with it, and they demonstrate and incarnate the basic principle of a peaceful and open democracy, namely personal freedom. In that regard, given their unique contribution to sustaining the originally non-urban Celtic settlement patterns they should receive heritage funding from the Government. Their cultural value alone, aside from their practical tourist function as B&Bs, surely must warrant an increase in the amount of tax euros paid to such home owners.

Mind you, that obscene Greek temple should definitely go.

All that these images demonstrate is that the modern one-off human settlement does not have the same physical appearance as a crannog. There is nothing surprising in this – neither do they look like 19th century cottages. Because the morphology of habitation types changes doesn’t mean that they have any less validity in terms of the place they fill in the settlement patterns of a culture. Insofar as the houses detailed above are concerned, yes – they do represent a continuation of one-off rural settlements embodied in earlier forms of one-off habitation such as the crannog and the cottage. Not surprisingly, their form may have changed, but their function as residences designed for human habitation has not. I could add in about 100 photos of houses and buildings around Dublin which have no historical precedent or cultural context in terms of their design and location.

Running through some of the main arguments against one-off houses, we have now seen that:

1. one-off houses are not necessarily the great drain on the urban tax payer as has been made out: they are often owned and built by net tax contributors; many are owned by people connected to the agricultural industry, many also function as B&Bs and therefore make an important contribution to the local and national economy;
2. they have an historical and cultural precedent – more so, indeed, than any form of urban habitation in Ireland;
3. in terms of the environmental effects of the dependence of one-off house owners on cars in comparison to that of city-dwelling drivers, it is well known that cars emit more fumes and consume more petrol when they are endlessly stopping and staring in traffic. As this form of driving is typical of urban driving and relatively free flowing driving is typical of that found on rural roads, it is fair to suggest that the damage done by one-off house cars is less than that done by urban-based vehicles.
4. in terms of one-off houses being ‘subsidized’ by city-dwellers taxes, it has been shown that the reverse is also the case in a great range of areas – a centralized tax system doesn’t benefit all of us all of the time – that is reality for everyone;
5. one-off houses encapsulate the principle of democratic choice – people should, within reason and with due respect for the rights of others, have the choice of living in a rural landscape if they so choose;
6. the question of sustainability – people have argued that one-off houses are not economically or environmentally sustainable, yet point out the huge number of such houses being built every year. Surely, in many cases, the larger the number of such houses, the more sustainable they become insofar as it will make servicing them more economical;
7. the question of purpose: one-off houses no longer have a function – they are no longer owned by farmers and no longer have any immediate functional relationship with the land- so the argument goes at least. Surely a similar argument can be made for the use of small artisan houses throughout Dublin, many of which were built to house workers to serve local industries and the docks. Is it legitimate then for these houses to be converted into little yuppy pads since they no longer have any connection to their original function? Is it legitimate to continue to build their modern equivalents (2 bedroom apartments) near the docks – I don’t see many yuppies putting on their donkey jackets to unload coal in Dublin port.
8. one-off houses lead to social isolation – surely this is for the one-off owner to decide – surely this is a matter of personal social choice that should be determined by the person that makes that lifestyle choice. A city-dweller should not assume the arrogant right of determining what is a suitable form of social existence for someone who doesn’t live in a city/town;

So we are left with two possibilities: one-offs do not fit the utopian vision of the countryside which urban-dwellers have clung to since the industrial revolution and are, therefore, aesthetically objectionable; or, urban-dwellers are envious that given house prices in urban areas they will never be able to afford to construct a house that fulfils their spatial needs or lifestyle desires. If this is to do with aesthetics, well, lets face it – Irish urban houses are hardly the embodiment of all things architecturally great.

@Thomond Park wrote:

Running through some of the main arguments against one-off houses, we have now seen that:

@Thomond Park wrote:

PDDL as you well know school buses postal companies and accidents caused by drunk drivers who have no potential to walk to the pub cost the entire population a huge amount of money and this cannot be allowed to continue

So drunk driving is a rural one-off house phenomenon. This is like me saying that joy-riding is solely an urban phenomenon. Then again, this was exactly the type of simplistic country-city argument that I was criticised for earlier in this thread! Interesting.

@Thomond Park wrote:

You have not proven this whatsoever]

If I have not proven that one-off settlements in Ireland have a historical or cultural precedent then you demand a higher level of evidence than a high court judge. I will re-state it: there have been one-off settlements in Ireland since the first settlement of the island 10,000 years or so ago. For most of that time, one-off settlements were the primary form of settlement in the country. Only until about 1,000 years ago with the arrival fo the Vikings, did any form of large scale urban settlement take place in Ireland. Even then, it took a further 700 years before we had anything close to a city of some size. I repeat – one-off settlements have an infinitely longer and richer cultural and historical precedent in Ireland that any form of urban settlement. If you don’t accept this, I am lost for words.

@Thomond Park wrote:

This is ridiculous if someone drives 20-95 miles to get to work they will of course consume far more fuel than someone driving 5 miles or taking the train or bus. This is typical of your attitude to discussion.

Driving without major hindrance for an hour in the country to get to a town or sitting in your car for an hour on the Naas dual carriageway – guess who does more damage to the environment? The latter.

@Thomond Park wrote:

Expenditure such as Old age pensions, unemployment benefit or policing are reasonable as most people will recieve them at some stage of their life]

This is a simplistic view of where your taxes go. Pensions and the dole only account for an element of the annual tax take and expenditure – there are a hundred other things taxes are spent on – some will benefit you, some won’t – accept that as a matter of economic and social fact.

@Thomond Park wrote:

So there are no limits? If the Archbishop of Dublin decided he wished to build a house in Merrion Square would this be acceptable?.

I never said there shouldn’t be limits. For example, that Grecian Temple in Graham Hickey’s post above is on eof the worst abominations that could be possible inflicted on the countryside. There are planning regulations – they should be obeyed. This , however, should not mean that one section of society should be able to decide wholesale how another section of society should exist or the form of reasonable habitation inwhich they choose to exist. I do not hear one-off owners complaing about the number of anti-social 2 bedroom apartments being built in Dublin and the damaging effect that such apartments will potentially have on the fabric of our cities and the social values of our state.

@Thomond Park wrote:

No it is putting more effluent into the ground water causing more wells to be contaminated as well as increasing Co2 emmissions which will lead to higher carbon tax fines when Ireland fails to meet its Kyoto protocol obligations.

And the Liffey is a model of environmental perfection – ya right. And Dublin doesn’t contribute its fair share tio Ireland’s CO2 emissions. Ya right. You really need to take your head of the smog.

@Thomond Park wrote:

Pathetic.

Was that a counter-argument?

@PDLL wrote:

And Dublin has a much greater problem with illegal drugs than Roscommon. That is a statistical fact. Treating and policing and providing the required social rehab facilities again costs money. Again though, this was the type of simplistic argument I was criticised for earlier. Why – because it might actually mean admitting that people who live in one-off settlements partly subsidize the treatment of such problems in our cities. That doesn’t fit well with the argument against those damn one-off parasites.

Then why does Roscommon have the only public representative in the Country elected on a ‘Legalise Drugs’ platform?

@PDLL wrote:

Just because it may have a public representative elected on a ‘Legalise Drugs’ platform does not mean that it has a greater problem with illegal drugs than Dublin has. This type of progression from one point to another without any logical relationship between the two points whatsoever suggests that your arguments may suffer from logical deficiencies. Again, this does not build confidence in terms of the arguments you proposed against one-off houses.

What you said above has about as much logicality to it as saying that just because the present pope comes from Germany means that Germany must be the most Catholic country in the world! Scary stuff indeed.

PDDL;

You are the one who introduced drugs into this; the one who introduced donkey jacketed ‘yuppies’ unloading coal into it. Therefore you should explain how the rural utopia you seem to claim exists can elect a public representative espousing legalisation of an evil so heinous that it gives everyone a right to escape all urban spaces and build whatever they want wherever they want whenever they want.

@PDLL wrote:

1. it cannot be automatically assumed that tax-payers in Dublin subsidize one-off houses in rural Ireland]

It is a statisitical fact that Urban Ireland i.e. Cork Dublin Limerick subsidise rural areas; as I keep stating most people in these cities have no problem with common benefits such as Old Age pension; police services health care etc. What people do have a problem with are roads being resurfaced a week before an election at the behest of clienist politicians to serve two bungalows on the side of a mountain. This is deeply inequitable and the sums of subsidy run to €bns of euro a year all in.

@PDLL wrote:

2. that one-off houses have a legitimate place in the countryside.

Except in very select cases where a farmer requires a house for a son or daughter actively involved in agricultural production. To prevent the widespread fraud that goes on occupancy conditions need to be enforced to prevent sites becoming the main crop.

@PDLL wrote:

As regards the public reprsentative in Roscommon – is that Ming the Merciless you are talking about (for those of you who don’t know him, I am serious)? The guy who developed his ideas on drugs a few years ago while a student at UCG? OK – I’s with you now but I am afraid that your argument is in no way strengthened by this point. Oh, ya, Roscommon has a prison – does that mean it has a higher crime rate that virtually every other county in Ireland (as only about 4 others have full prisons to the best of my knowledge)?

So you are basically saying that prisons cause higher crime and not cities; I had never thought of that angle but there could be a certain merit in it. It will be interesting to see what the situation is at the new super prison near ashbourne when completed in a rural area.

Crime and drugs were never my argument; Unlike those arguing for proper planning and sustainable development it is quite common for those arguing for unrestricted one-off houses to paint an unfair picture of urban Ireland stating that Dublin is one ‘high density drug ridden slum where if the junkies don’t get you the unemployed will’

I suggest you stop digging

@Thomond Park wrote:

It is a statisitical fact that Urban Ireland i.e. Cork Dublin Limerick subsidise rural areas]

This is the mainstay of the anti-one-off argument. Please provide me with the statistical breakdown showing exactly how much urban tax payers money DIRECTLY subsidizes one-off houses. Then calculate the net contribution the owners of those houses make to the state through net tax payments, B&B revenues and agricultural incomes and subtract it. Please show me these figures. I am very interested in seeing them as this is what your argument continually falls back on. Surprise, you cannot show me them. Then basically you have no argument – you have conjecture as vapourous as the gasses coming out the back of your car.

@Thomond Park wrote:

Except in very select cases where a farmer requires a house for a son or daughter actively involved in agricultural production. To prevent the widespread fraud that goes on occupancy conditions need to be enforced to prevent sites becoming the main crop. .

So by this logic, only dockers and the sons and daughters of dockers should be allowed live in Dublins docklands. Please correct me if I have misunderstood you. If a banker should be allowed live there, then surely a banker should be allowed live in a field in Co.Offaly?? Or is there one rule for towns and another for cities?