Government to lift ban on single rural houses
This major planning U-turn will be one of the main planks of the long-awaited National Spatial Strategy due to be published in October.
It will be launched along with a decentralisation programme that will see thousands of civil service jobs re-located outside Dublin, Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Minister Eamon Ó Cuív has confirmed.
"There will be a clear statement in the strategy that rural people with connections in the countryside will be allowed to build their own houses there," Minister Ó Cuív said.
"There is no point bringing people back to rural areas if they do not have jobs and that is why it will be launched along with the decentralisation programme."
The Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs was the only one to escape the latest wave of cutbacks demanded by Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy.
"It shows this Government is serious about rural regeneration," Minister Ó Cuív said.
The main impetus for lifting the ban on one-off rural houses was the latest census, which shows more than half the Republic's 3.9 million population is now living in Leinster.
This has left a huge dependent population in the west, south and northwest because the 20-50 age group have been forced to leave.
But the almost nationwide ban on building single houses in rural areas was imposed because planners believed they were not environmentally sustainable.
They argued the proliferation of individual septic tanks and water supplies were bad for the environment and it was better to build clusters of houses that would only require one large septic tank and a single water supply.
The ban caused uproar among farmers in particular. They felt it was unfair that their children could not build a home in their own locality.
But now local authorities will be obliged to lift the ban on one-off houses once it appears as national policy in the spatial strategy the framework for all future nationwide planning.
The IFA welcomed the change in policy last night and said it would be a major help in rejuvenating rural Ireland.
IFA environmental spokesman Francis Fanning said it will help rural communities survive.
But Mr Fanning said anyone building a single house in rural Ireland must accept the way of life there.
Minister Ó Cuív stressed there will not be a return to the bungalow blitz that blighted the landscape in the 1970s and 80s.
These one-off houses will have to be built back from the roads and the planning cannot be sold on to developers or for holiday homes.
