Government-by-numbers

I think these measures are long over due for far too long people have been complaining about people doing what they want to do. Thanks to Dick Roche the nanny state is gone.

There are also doubts as to its constituitionality.

And Belgium has properly planned rural areas; despite being far more densely populated than Ireland (10 million people living in 30k km sq, as opposed to 4 mill living in 70k km sq) they don’t have this continuous suburbanisation of the landscape. They have sustainable villages, well preserved and well served by public services. We could learn a lot from those ‘meddling beaurocrats’.

And quant little Ireland does put food on the table, in the form of tourism revenue. Which, particularly if you take transfer payments out, is the single biggest industry we have.

I challenge you to stand anywhere in Belgium apart from the first world war battlefields and not see a building.

Leaving aside Flanders, there are plenty of places right across the south of Belgium that are characterised by villages and wide open fields. The area south of Mons, Namur and around Huy are cases in point.

WE DONT HAVE ENOUGH HOUSES IN THIS COUNTRY!

Is THAT not the main problem

No, its not the problem. The problem is that we don’t have enough houses where we need them. The population is growing dramatically in and around our larger cities (because thats where the jobs are), its falling out side of those areas. We’ve built almost 80,000 new units last year in this country, and will do the same this year. Thats at or slightly above what the market requires. The rates of price increase are coming down accordingly. All of these things are welcome. Its not about being ‘anti-development’.

‘Just building houses’ is only part of the issue, the real problem with this measure is that it will contribute to unsustainable patterns of development. I don’t mean that in an environmental sense, rather that it will be all but impossible to service a new raft of widely dispersed houses. Getting public transport, telecomms (incl broadband) sewage (Roche has to know that the Commission are getting hot n’heavy over septic tanks), health care, policing etc to a newly dispersed rural population is just compounding existing problems. The transport issues alone merit the scrapping of this proposal; its a classic case of unlearning lessons.

Its already fairly straighforward to build in the country, this just facilitates rural property development as a form of social welfare. Future generations will pay the price of it, just as we pay the price of the 70s madness.

If a disabled person that requires family assistance is not allowed live beside their family

I call your b*llshit. If there was a single case of a disabled person being forced to live miles from their families because of evil planners, they’d be paraded around like the goat at the Puck fair by the usual selection of local councillors, builders, auctioneers and landowners keen to to peddle sites. This is similar to the b*llshit claim that local children are not being allowed to live near their parents on the family farm. There are simply NO documentated cases of this happening.

Let’s face it; this is a big industry which makes money for landowners, auctioneers and builders. Except for this small self-interested group, most country people are against houses being built all over the place. Of course there are some country people who’ve swallowed the “evil Dublin 4 city types telling us what to do” false populist indignation peddled by the aforementioned concillors cum builders/landowners/etc. but most see it for what it is.

I heard councillor a particular FF councillor from Mayo being made look like a complete fool on the radio about a year ago as he berated An Taisce for wanting to “ethnically cleanse the countryside” . The An Taisce representative asked him could he put a number on the amount of objections they (An Taisce) had made in Mayo in the previous year. After a whole load of bluster he admitted he didn’t; the An Taisce representative told him that they had made ONE SINGLE objection during the year. In the meantime, drive about five miles out the road from this councillors home town in Mayo and observe the rows of not yet completed bungalows with “For Sale” signs from the councillor’s auctioneering business. This is happening all over the country; “local people” apply for and get planning permission on the farcical basis that they intend to live “near their roots” only to stick up a “For Sale” sign four months later without ever spending a single night on the property.

Obviously if I was involved in this industry myself, I’d probably feel threatend by planning guidelines. However I think it’s pretty despicable to use false and unfounded images of disabled people being forced to live apart from their relatives and farmers’ children being driven away from the land to promote an environmentally damaging industry.

Overall , this policy will only work if the granting of planning permision is removed from local authorities’ remit. I remember being told by the Director of the General Council of County Councils (the County Councils’ lobby group) that at one of his first official engagements in that role, he was taking to a newly elected rural councillor, who told him that his primary objective as a councillor was “to increase the hope value of land”. Say no more.

I cannot help thinking of Germany in 2003 when we visited the in-laws in a village outside a satellite town (Zirndorf) of Nuremberg….. it was so neatly done, despite most of the houses being less that 30 years old, that it felt like a traditional village without being traditional houses – and there was no “leakage” of the town or village into the surrounding landscape, I walked between them (20 minute walk) and one ended, there was farming lanbd, and the next one started. In Ireland, it would have been bungalows all the way between them

If you listen to the pat kenny show ….from yesterday……….bizarre ……..the article before Roche was on speaks about how the numbers of ‘ramblers’ people who come to Ireland to enjoy hill walking etc. as tourists has declined dramatically over the last 5 years………..then the speak about the new leglisation ………..and the destruction of the countryside ….somehow they fail completely to draw a link between the two……

The term cities is so often used in this debate.
There are alternative settlement patterns you know 🙂

Yes DaM, had to laugh at the lack of connection between the issue of one-off dveleopment and rural walking.
One would wonder though if many tourists find it a charming feature of Ireland to have the landscape dotted with houses – ‘the lights of the parish sparkling in the hills’…
Itr is ironic that the term parish is often used when often there’s not a church to be had for miles.

Have to ask again though – is the issue of sustainablity regarding car-dependancy a void one?
No matter what way you look at it, the oil’s going to go inside 50 years at best, with prices soaring in the interim.
It is often noted with the one-off issue that the long-term is not considered. Well if one does consider the long-term, alternative sustainable energy forms will have have to been developed by then; all our one-offers could be sailing around in their wind generated-electricity powered cars…
Likewise septic tank technology will have moved on, or rather the technologies that other EU states have will finally have been enforced over here.

Is this not an issue of traffic generation, cost of supplying services, and aesthetics, rather than an environmental one?
Apologies if that sounds naive, but I just think we need to look in the long term on all fronts.

Hi Thomond Park,

Off the point, but I’d just like to correct you about “perpetuity”.
What you are referring to is called the “Rule against Perpetuities”, a rule which applies to gifts in wills to prevent them from being handed out at ridiculously far away times in the future – e.g. I give it to the first man to fly to the other side of the galaxy. Originally it was designed so a man who didn’t like his son giving his property to his grandson – even if that grandson wasn’t born. Thus one had to specify that the gift was being given to someone born within 21 years (the age of majority) of the death of someone – (i.e. the son) plus 9 months for the gestation. The idea being that a grandson is going to become 21 at a maximum time of 21 years and 9 months after the death of the son. Lawyers started to get clever with all that and decided that it need not be the son whose lifespan was measured against – but they did need someone famous, so that people would actually know who. In England it became “the death of the last currently living issue of the King”. If one didn’t use such rules, then the gift is void and goes back to the will, to follow rules on intestacy/remainder etc.