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.