The Reality of Planning Policy in Ireland today and the difficulty young couples in their 30s are facing trying to build family homes.
Despite being fortunate enough to be in a position of being gifted family land to build our dream home, planning policy in Ireland is making this an impossibility. My partner of five years and I are both in our thirties and currently living in my parents’ house while we fight to get planning permission in the field next door. We live in private lane that has been in existence for well over 100 years, where my grand-parents and great-grandparents lived and raised their families. The lane in question and family farm has only one access point that joins a national road.
Planning Policy dictates that intensification onto national roads is prohibited unless coming from a local or regional road or failing that we must be within a 60km speed zone.
Unfortunately for us we are 120 metres outside of the 60km zone and therefore accessing the national road in an 80km zone. A common sense approach would surely be that, given the fact that we are both currently residing at my parents’ house, the home I have lived in for over 30 years, and using the exact same laneway and entrance every single day, building a home in the field next door could not be considered intensification.As the country has been facing a housing crisis for the last number of years, there is no one helping the young people who are working every day and saving hard to build a house of their own.
TII policy needs to be looked at from a more local level instead of being written by individuals who will never be affected by their one approach fits all policy. As we sit here considering our options and the harsh policies being imposed on us, the reality is while we have acres of farmland to build on we are unable to do so without purchasing more land. In a country where young people of our age have been failed time and time again, immigration is looking increasingly attractive. Written by two very frustrated individuals.
Aisling Glackin
Donegal
Government acts too slow on the hotel quarantining
What part of the word ‘emergency’ does our Government not understand. We’ve been talking about ‘hotel quarantining’ of incoming travellers for (it seems) months. It should be possible to set up a system in 48 hours! Instead, the whole thing is taking weeks to get through the Dáil and Senate. The Government should have taken emergency powers and just done it. The Dáil and Senate could have ratified it later or even decreed that it be abolished (I don’t think they’re that stupid, but who knows.) The system would then need to be enforced properly. Instead, we have a bit of headless chicken syndrome.
Even what we have is not being really enforced. If US forces want to overnight in Shannon, insist that unless they can produce proof of vaccination they must stay in a designated part of the airport. Supply food and drink and even air mattresses if needs be. Don’t have any incoming passengers posing a danger to the public, no matter who they are.
Pat Browne
Blackrock
Cork
Stop it with all these lockdowns
Since March 2020, we’ve been locked down in one form or another. For a large part of the past year, a lot of us haven’t been able to work, like wet pub workers. A lot of us haven’t been able to see our family, because we might make them sick — and then again, we might not.
For the last while, a lot of us — me included – have been clinging to any form of hope we could return to real, true normal life, only for it to be snatched away by the Government announcing harder restrictions, far less room to travel, no longer being able to work, or limiting just how many people can see a friend, or family, in a nursing home.
A couple of weeks ago, the level 5 lockdown was set to end January 31. Then, March 5. And just this last week, not until April 5. And that’s not even about ending lockdown, but just ‘reviewing’ the situation!
With the arrival of vaccines, people getting vaccinated and just how maddeningly severe this lockdown is, it’s time for it to end.
Not in late March, or early April, but now. People need to work again. They need some hope and something to look forward to, not a date for going back to normal constantly snatched away. It’s cruel, illogical and completely unfair. Just ask anyone with kids, or anyone who had a job back in December, or who’s retired. I doubt they’re happy and neither am I – and I’m not an older man, a parent, or anything like that. Just imagine how much worse it is for them.
People need to see people. People need to work. People need normal – and they need it now.
Robbie Rowe
Co Wexford
Martin compares well to Johnson
Robert Sullivan in his letter on February 27 tells us that the British prime minister Boris Johnson is more ‘sure-footed’ than the Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
It is arguable that that statement could stand up to any level of scrutiny.
Boris Johnson has led a Brexiteer campaign in the UK that tore up an agreement with nearly 30 European democracies.
That EU agreement is the most advanced such agreement in the world.
In the EU agreement each of the nearly 30 democracies undertakes to cooperate in matters of mutual interest in a continent that has a history of conflict for centuries.In supporting Brexit Boris Johnson also supported a campaign that, but for the intervention of the EU, would have torn up the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
That international agreement, which was signed by both the UK and this country, was approved by a vote in both the north and south of this island and drew a line under centuries of colonial conflict.
In the last 12 months, Boris Johnson has presided over a coronavirus situation in the UK in which the incidence of the disease relative to population is one of the highest in the world and is more than twice what it is in this country.
In relation to Micheál Martin, Robert Sullivan thinks he might not be great on TV. But one thing is for sure. In running a country, he compares well with Boris Johnson.
A. Leavy
Sutton
Dublin 13
British PM right to set reopening date
The one thing people want is certainty. We just want dates by which we’ll be free to go and do. Boris has given the people of Britain just that. No matter that the dates might change, we could put up with that without having to examine a whole pile of unintelligible figures, statistics and conditional speak from politicians, statisticians and so-called health experts. I’m bulling with Boris.
Come back Boris, all is forgiven.
Kevin T Finn
Mitchelstown
Co Cork
Stop copulation to control population?
I’m not in favour of population control, but promoting condoms to prevent pandemics makes no sense (“Condoms can help with crisis” Ian Hester, Irish Examiner,February 27). For a start, abstinence is 100% effective against pregnancy, condoms are not. After all the sacrifices people have been asked to make, surely one more is not too much ‘for the future of the species’?
But why even bother with such measures in the first place?
If world over-population is the real and terrible problem it’s made out to be, surely just letting pandemics rip would be the fastest and most natural way of dealing with it? Just one statistic is sufficient to dispel the notion that reducing world population will safeguard against pandemics. In 1347m the global population stood at an estimated 450m — a mere fraction, 1/18 of today’s 8bon. That didn’t stop the Black Death sweeping through the known world, taking with it almost a third of the population in a few short years.
On the contrary larger and less homogenous populations give greater chances of more people surviving. In any case, until proponents of population control can state precisely and logically what the ‘correct’ number
of people for the world should be, all discussion on over- and under-population is essentially meaningless.
Nick Folley
Ardcarrig
Carrigaline
Co Cork
Erase rubbers with surgical alternative
So Ian Hester is of the opinion that condoms are the cure for population control.
Really! As if we didn’t have enough plastic littering every beauty spot in the country. Condoms are, like the majority of masks, single-use only.
Would a surgical intervention, (a once-off for both sexes) not be a more permanent, environmentally friendly solution to put a stop to one’s fertile gallop?
To show his commitment to same, would Mr Hester care to step up to the medical plate?
Aileen Hooper
Norseman Place
Stoneybatter
Dublin 7
