An Taisce is ‘enemy No 1’

PLANNING organisation An Taisce has been labelled “public enemy number one” by rural dwellers annoyed at its objections to housing plans.

The Irish Rural Dwellers Association, holding its first convention tomorrow, says An Taisce’s constant planning objections to one-off housing were depopulating rural Ireland.

“Villages can’t survive without houses in the hinterland. An Taisce are planning from Dublin and ignoring the common point of view. Democracy has gone out the door,” said the association’s acting secretary, Jim Connolly.

Former president of the GAA Joe McDonagh will speak at the association’s conference in the Galway Bay Golf and Country Club Hotel. Independent TD Marion Harkin, ICMSA president Pat O’Rourke, the poet Cathal O’Searcaigh and the Ceide Fields archaeologist Dr Seamus Caulfield are among the association’s members.

Mr Connolly said the association would provide a counterbalance to An Taisce, which lodges more than 2,000 planning submissions each year.

“We’re going to question everything about them - who they are and where their members are from. An Taisce has a policy of land clearance in rural areas but we are in favour of population growth around towns and villages, a pattern which has existed for thousands of years,” he said.

One man from Glenbeagh in Co Kerry said An Taisce’s members want the countryside “left empty for themselves so they can walk on it”. The man, who did not wish to be named, said An Taisce had delayed the building of his house for two years. “An Taisce appealed to An Bord Pleanala, saying that my house would be obtrusive to the view of the Ring of Kerry. But it was a mile from the main road, it was a bungalow, not a multi-story house and it was on my own land. It was finally granted planning permission but I haven’t started building yet. An Taisce’s attitude makes no sense at all,” he said.

An An Taisce spokesperson said there was a lot of “naive and misinformed” thinking about rural planning. “The idea of a barren countryside is a sort of apocalypse scenario and it’s absurd. The real issue is how to develop the rural economy and unsustainable housing is not the answer. People like Jim Connolly are anti-planning and

anti-sustainable development,” said heritage officer Ian Lumley. He rejected the criticism that An Taisce was allowing rural communities to die off by objecting to houses for sons and daughters of locals. “We’d never suggest suburban people should be allowed build houses for their relatives in their back gardens.”