Only locals, landowners and farmers need apply

In the first of a two-part series, Caroline O’Doherty details the differing views in the rural housing debate.

BY any standards, the case made by the young couple seeking to build their own home seemed a compelling one.

She was a public servant working in a small community, where she was heavily involved in voluntary activities. Dependant on her own car for transport, and with a progressive medical condition that would gradually diminish her ability to drive, her consultant had recommended she move within walking distance of her workplace.

He was in private business, commuting further than he liked given his concern for his elderly and ailing father. His employers had given him clearance to work from home, so he designed a house with an office and accommodation for his parents whose own home could not be adapted to provide the ground-floor living quarters his father required.

Together they searched long and hard for a site that would meet their needs and breathed a sigh of relief when they finally found it. But they hit a brick wall before a block could be laid.

As non-locals, non-landowners and non-farmers, they fell foul of the Government’s guidelines governing who gets to build in a rural area. Other houses had been built around their site, but theirs was considered by their county council, and by two of their prospective neighbours who objected, as one too many.

They appealed to An Bord Pleanála, reducing the size of the house plans in the process, but without success. Besides echoing the guidelines on rural housing, the inspector also questioned the eye consultant’s recommendation, noting that the medic was unable to say for absolute certain when or if the woman’s medical condition would deteriorate to the point where she could not drive.

Letters of support from doctors, employers, local community leaders and a Government minister had no effect. While describing the couple’s plight as “unfortunate”, the inspector ruled they had not demonstrated a need to build on the site and that their house would “seriously injure the property in the vicinity and would be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area”.

Of all planning battles, those involving one-off rural houses are probably the most emotive. They may not attract headlines like contentious commercial and infrastructural developments, but the very personal nature of a quest to build a home on what is often generations old family land can leave feelings running higher than if there were millions of euro at stake.

The case highlighted here is just one of the many personal battles that appeared on the files of An Bord Pleanála in recent months. The files are publicly available but we have excluded names and locations as none of those approached by the Irish Examiner wished to discuss their case openly.

Discomfort at having private details publicly recorded mixed with reluctance to criticise the decisions of planners they may have to negotiate with again were cited repeatedly as reasons deterring them from speaking.

In one case, a recently retired and determinedly self-reliant woman with a disability was forced to live with a son and his young family after being refused permission to build a small adapted house nearby, despite having the means, desire and ability to live independently.

Again, she wasn’t local, having only moved to the area after a long spell living abroad, and she wasn’t involved in an agricultural or otherwise exclusively rural activity.

Her daughter requested anonymity but expressed deep frustration. “Did they miss the part where my mother said she was retired? And did they expect her to take on a herd of cattle when she has a disability?”

Another case involved a post-retirement age man whose accommodation was linked to his job. While not under imminent threat of eviction, he did need to find alternative living arrangements but his hopes of building a small place on a site given to him by his family in a nearby village were dashed despite the fact that he was to work part-time serving that rural community.

He was refused permission both by his county council and An Bord Pleanála, and noted with bafflement that an estate of houses was built in the same village, utterly altering its character and bringing traffic troubles where there had been none, yet his proposed small dwelling was considered unsuitable development.

This man is a well-known figure in the town where he lives and is used to speaking publicly but even he requested anonymity, admitting with embarrassment a fear of upsetting the planners.

The guidelines also prevented the return to Ireland of a woman seeking to retire here after long years working abroad. She applied for permission to build three times without success, and was once even deemed eligible to buy a ready-built in a locals-only development only to have the offer withdrawn on review.

There are copious other examples on file of what appear to be particularly harsh decisions against people seeking to build one-off rural houses. While there is no dispute that strong planning law is essential to prevent random, uncontrolled development, there is considerable debate over whether these kind of people were the intended targets of its constraints.

Nora Flynn, a Fine Gael member of Waterford County Council, voted against the body’s last county development plan in protest at its restrictive eligibility criteria for one-off housing applicants and she feels that people with genuine need are being made pay the price for those who allowed or benefited from the looser regulatory environment of the past.

“What’s ruined it in some rural places is that you see houses that should be in urban areas — big houses with electronic gates that don’t blend in. I feel that ruined it for everyone else,” she says.

One close observer of the planning system said, however, that some councillors were in denial about the real motives and consequences for many rural housing applications. “There is some element of sustaining local communities but clearly it’s a lot to do with converting farmland into a serious asset rather than any loftier ideal.

“There are places on the outskirts of rural Kildare, Meath and Dublin where you have select upper class enclaves with electric gates and where the road outside the local school is like a showroom for SUVs. That’s not about sustaining communities – it’s about creating exclusivity.”

Polarised views are the hallmark of the debate. What is one man’s natural birthright is another man’s unfettered greed. What is one man’s sight for sore eyes is another’s blot on the landscape.

An Taisce, the powerful conservation body which has a statutory right to be consulted about all planning applications, is vehemently opposed to one-off housing, considering such dwellings to be was inefficient, unsustainable, unattractive, unnecessary, polluting and a tourism turn-off.

During the cryptosporidium crisis that hit Galway’s water supply last spring, An Taisce was among those pointing the finger of blame at the proliferation of one-off houses spreading out from the city with septic tanks allegedly spilling torrents of under-treated sewage and waste water into the lakes that served as the area’s main water supply.

High profile members of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland have taken a similar line to An Taisce, as has the Irish Planning Institute and the Green Party. An Bord Pleanála also expressed concerns about one-off housing last November, citing Environmental Protection Agency findings that 57% of groundwater tested was found to be contaminated by excrement.

“The 15,000-17,000 rural houses being built every year are adding to pressure on groundwater resources and must be accounting for some of the decline in standards reported by the EPA,” board chairman John O’Connor said at the time, although the statistics he quotes are disputed.

On the opposite side is the Irish Rural Dwellers’ Association, the Irish Farmers’ Association, the many individuals who apply for and/or build one-off houses each year and an undetermined number of public representatives who support them.

The Association of County and City Councils, which represents almost 900 local councillors, did attempt to agree a unified policy a few years back which stated that the “special circumstances of rural Ireland” must be “thoroughly accepted” in all planning decisions, and which called for the withdrawal of An Taisce’s consultative role, but that policy paper has been shelved.

“You are talking about a subject with very diverse views,” says Cllr Nora Flynn, the past chairperson of the association.

“You have a lot of councils that are more urbanised than others and they take different views. You would never get 100% agreement.”

The most outspoken group in favour of a more expansive approach to one-off housing is the rural dwellers, whose acting secretary, Jim Connolly, believes the regulations, or at least the way they are interpreted, are fundamentally anti-rural.

“You would think they way some people talk that building homes ruins the countryside but what is the countryside without life in it? Without people and homes and communities? We’re not trying to ruin the countryside — we’re trying to keep it alive.”

An Taisce has little time for the rural dwellers’ association, accusing the organisation of promoting what it calls “site farming” — the pursuit of planning permission for profit. Far from being too restrictive, he believes current guidelines on rural housing don’t go far enough, not least because they are only guidelines, not statutory regulations.

“They are ignored in many cases. We can see that from the amount of ribbon development that’s still going on and the amount of single houses being built along national and regional routes,” An Taisce’s heritage officer, Ian Lumley says.

“In any case they [the guidelines] are too loose and ambiguous. For example, planners only have to give consideration to the fact that a site may be in a special conservation area or heritage area when those designations should automatically preclude any development.”

Lumley doesn’t accept the arguments about advances in water and sewage treatment technology making up for the failings of the crude septic tanks of the past. “There is absolutely no follow-up inspection by local authorities so there is no enforcement of standards.”

He accuses councillors of being short-sighted about rural housing, saying they prefer to push a constituent’s case in return for electoral support rather than assess the long-term implications of a given development.

“Councillors don’t take the issue seriously. The capital gain of an individual landowner getting permission to turn a bit of boggy ground into a site for development is too great. You can dress it up in rhetoric about preserving rural communities, but it’s really to do with making money.”

Money is also an issue for the rural dwellers, but in a very different context. The organisation feels individuals who could build their own homes for a fraction of the market price are being deliberately forced to buy ready-builts in estates at the inflated prices enjoyed by large-scale developers. “You can’t be taking business from the developers — they have to be kept happy,” Jim Connolly says.

Andrew Hind, president of the Irish Planning Institute, however, makes a case against one-off rural housing. “Our concern about rural housing would be where people’s economic and social ties are to a town or city some distance away.

“They might have some personal family ties to the area but if it results in long distance commuting for work or school it might not be a good idea. It will rely almost forever on increasing use of private cars.

“There are also issues about servicing these isolated houses — power, communications, clean drinking water, waste services. The evidence is that one-off housing is increasing ground water pollution so really this form of development is not passing the test of sustainability.

“At the same time, we don’t want our rural areas to die. I think the way to promote steady population growth and stable population is by looking at the economies of those areas. If we can strengthen employment opportunities by, for example, increasing small IT related businesses, maybe in that way we can replace some of the employment in agriculture that is being lost.”

Cllr Nora Flynn, on the other hand, believes the guidelines on rural housing are fundamentally flawed because of the bias towards local landowners and their families.

“I didn’t vote for our last county development plan because I felt it was discriminatory. If you can get a site and everything’s ok with the roads and sewage etc, why should you not be allowed to build just because you’re from the town?

“I believe it’s unconstitutional because it creates a class of people who are privileged by virtue of where they were born and discriminates against everyone else.”