Irish Examiner view: One-off rural homes policy makes sense

Restrictions on building new homes has been a bugbear for generations of rural dwellers

Housing minister James Browne with ministers Dara Calleary, John Cummins, and Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran and the Sweeney family at their family home in Ardee, Co Louth, announcing the new housing policy. Picture: Marc O'Sullivan

Common sense is not something you could easily associate with much of the Government’s housing policy, but the new rules around one-off housing in rural areas are just that.

The guidelines announced on Wednesday will make it easier for families to build one-off homes in their locality — a bugbear for generations of rural dwellers — and are to be welcomed.

The draft national planning statement presented to Cabinet sets out the criteria that rural dwellers will need to fulfil in order to build a home.

They have signified a move away from the restrictive planning practices which have frustrated so many people for so long.

That rural dwellers who want to remain as such have been forced to find and/or build housing far away from where they were reared or brought up has long been an irritation. That retiring farmers cannot access planning permission for family who want to live and work on the land, is another of the frustrations with the current requirements.

Housing minister James Browne said the guidelines “strike the right balance between supporting rural communities, ensuring vibrant rural towns and villages, and protecting the character and sustainability of our countryside”.

“We are removing arbitrary and prescriptive local rules and ensuring each application is assessed fairly on its merits,” he said. “Crucially, this will end the current Eircode lottery where a house may be permitted in one part of the country while down the road in a neighbouring county, permission would be denied for the exact same development.”

Interestingly, the Government hasn’t set any targets on the numbers of homes to be built and this will have to be monitored given concerns raised in the past by the likes of the Climate Change Advisory Council and the ESRI. But that’s for another day.

Trump thwarted again by judges

There is endless irony in the fact that the US Supreme Court has this week ruled against much of the pillar legislation advanced by the Trump administration since it came to power nearly two years ago.

That Donald Trump has personally appointed three of the nine justices that make up the court — making for a conservative majority supposed to bend willingly to the US president’s wishes — makes some of their decisions this week annoying and frustrating for the White House.

Yesterday’s decision by the court to uphold birthright citizenship, striking down an executive order made by the president on the first day of his second term in office, is a massive blow to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. The court decided that the order would override the US Constitution.

It was part of a policy long pursued by the US president to prevent babies born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents from automatically becoming US citizens.

Following the court’s decision on Monday to allow individual states accept mail-in votes postmarked on the day of an election to be counted up to five business days later, the birthright citizenship decision is another embarrassing slap-down for Trump. He has long sought to curtail voting by mail and was desperate to have done so by this November’s mid-term elections which, if lost by his Republican party, will render him a ‘lame duck’ president unable to pass any meaningful legislation.

Typically, Trump was said to be incandescent by these decisions, railing against those judges he had himself appointed for not bending to his will. Indeed, he has been vociferous about any judge or court within the US justice system which sides against him.

Certainly, he has had success with a number of US Supreme Court findings, many of which landed this week as it came to the end of its current term. But he is infuriated that two of the most critical elements of his grand plan have been rejected. That it previously found his legislation on broad emergency trade tariffs to be illegal was another major blow to his agenda.

One reason the court pushback has so infuriated the Oval Office is that Trump is increasingly worried that, should the Republicans lose control of the Senate in November, he will face many investigations and possibly even impeachment for a third time.

The US Supreme Court is supposed to be the final arbiter of constitutional matters there, and Trump is finding out that, despite his appointments and interventions, it is doing the job it is supposed to do, rather than the one he wants it to.

Justice delayed amid fees row

The swift administration of justice in this country is a key characteristic of the judicial system, but the threat by solicitors on the free legal aid scheme to resign from it if new legislation on payment changes is signed into law, undermines that very tenet.

At present, solicitors are paid a fee of approximately €240 for a first appearance for a legal aid client and about €60 for each subsequent court appearance. Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan — himself a solicitor by trade — is proposing to replace the system with one where only a single payment is made.

He has insisted that this single payment will be “very generous” — estimated to be between €455 and €582 per case — and says it will remove serious inefficiencies in the District Court system, where spending on criminal legal aid has soared in recent years. He also told the Oireachtas justice committee yesterday evening that the current system was being abused. He claimed the changes will make the system more “efficient”.

Any hopes of a quick resolution appear to be dashed after the Law Society described the move as “cost-cutting dressed up as reform”. In a statement, they said solicitors are “very angry” with the minister’s actions. The last thing the criminal justice system needs now is further delays but, at this stage, that’s the one thing that’s guaranteed.

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