Planning process: ‘Running out rural families’

AMORPHOUS was a new one on Mary Sweeney. She had seen planners use many descriptions before but this one necessitated consulting a dictionary.

“Shapeless and having no recognisable character — that’s what it meant,” she says. “That’s an insult to an area where families have lived for years and years.”

The term was used by An Bord Pleanála to describe a proposal by Mary and Seán Sweeney’s son, Pádraig, to build a house on a site on his parents’ small farm beside Lough Leane at Tomies, Beaufort, a short distance from Killarney, Co Kerry.

Pádraig, like his eldest sister Caroline before him, was granted permission to build by Kerry County Council but the decision was overturned on appeal. The nature of the development, rather than the physical design of the house, would be amorphous, not conforming to any approved settlement pattern.

The Sweeneys’ experience of trying to build on land that has been in their family for generations illustrates a number of features of the Irish planning system — the contentious debate around one-off rural housing, apparent inconsistencies in granting permission and the almost unique law that gives anyone in any part of the country the right to object to any planning application regardless of whether it impacts directly on them or not.

Caroline, 33, began her journey through the system in 1998. She was living with her new baby in a converted garage at the back of the family home which Seán, who had retired from the Leibherr crane factory in Killarney, and Mary were running as a bed and breakfast to boost the income from their 13 acres and small herd of cattle.

The site her parents offered her was in an adjoining field with a fine view of the lake, well sheltered by trees, and just enough distance from the family home to afford both households a comfortable mix of closeness and privacy.

Despite the fairly tight regulations on one-off housing in the area, Kerry County Council approved the plan. “She [Caroline] was a daughter of the landowner and was from the area and was working in the area so she came under all the guidelines,” Mary explains.

However, an objector appeared — a man who lived in Tralee about 20 miles away — who argued another house in the area could threaten the lake with pollution.

Three times Caroline applied to build a modest family home, each time amending the plan to try to comply with concerns raised, three times the county council approved, three times Michael Horgan objected and three times An Bord Pleanála overturned her planning permission.

Defeated, Caroline, her husband and nine-year-old daughter, Amy, now live 10 miles away in Milltown.

Amy still attends the local school in Beaufort and rushes through Seán and Mary’s house each day to visit the pony her doting granddad bought her. Then Caroline’s brother Pádraig, 31, decided to try his luck. He chose a different site close by and submitted a similarly modest house plan which the council approved. However, Mr Horgan objected again and once again, An Bord Pleanála overturned the permission.

The objection differed somewhat this time, focusing not just on pollution risks, but also on the contention that Pádraig had no need for a house as his parents had a second home.

That home was the cottage where Seán himself was reared and where he and Mary lived with their family, including Seán’s father, until 1989, when they moved from their cramped conditions into their current home a few yards away.

They decided to keep the cottage, turning it into holiday accommodation to facilitate an overflow from the bed and breakfast during busy periods or when large family groups were staying.

The Sweeneys were stunned that the dwelling could be brought into the equation now, not least because they had two other daughters, younger than Pádraig, and to assume that one of their four offspring should have an automatic entitlement to it was to decide on inheritance issues that as parents they had not even begun to address.

“The cottage is part of our livelihood and we refurbished it for that purpose. We said this will be a bit of income for our retirement.

I don’t see why any organisation or government body can have the power to take away your income. The Department of Social Welfare are encouraging you to make provision for your retirement and another body wants to take that away,” Mary says.

The Sweeneys are annoyed with Mr Horgan, although they acknowledge he was exercising his legal entitlement to object, but they are particularly angry with the way the planning system is structured and administered.

“I cannot see why one man should be allowed stop it,” says Seán.

He is also angry that the use of the term “sustainable development” is repeatedly used as a criteria in planning documents without, as he sees it, any thought as to what sustainable means.

“As far as I’m concerned, it means to sustain life in an area and to keep families in an area, to build houses that would be homes 12 months of the year and not holiday homes for the summer. Well, that’s all my family has been trying to do.”

He looks to the fields, the B&B and the small fishing boat he uses to take anglers out on the lake: “It looks like all this is going to die with me.

“You can not imagine the uproar if I got dogs and rounded up the deer and ran them out of the forest here.

“Yet that’s what they’re doing to the people — running them out of the countryside.”

Seán insists that with the sophisticated biocycle treatment systems now available to householders, no harmful sewage or waste water from his or his children’s homes would ever enter the lake.

“There has been massive development around Killarney in the last 10 years — whole estates of hundreds of housing using treatment systems made for 20 or 30 — but who do they blame for pollution? The one-off house with the septic tank.”

Across the road from their house, three holiday homes have been built in the last few years, while across the lake are the massive structures of the Hotel Europe and Castlerosse Hotel.

Seán says: “I never had any problem with these developments. Live and let live, I say. But why aren’t we being let live our lives too?”