Yes: Josephine O’Neill: Liberalising the rural planning guidelines to allow for one-off housing, particularly for young people from farming backgrounds building on family-owned land, is a vital step to securing the future of rural Ireland
The recent publication of Census 1926 was met with a frenzied interest in the life of our ancestors. I, like many others, searched for my grandparents. Both of my grandfathers were recorded there. Like many others, both were farmers’ sons and later farmers themselves. Life in rural Ireland during my grandfathers’ time was undoubtedly vastly different from the landscape we now find ourselves in and the publication of this census amid mutterings of potential changes to rural planning guidelines compelled me to consider not just the differences but also the similarities that myself and my grandparents experienced as rural young people beginning their journey through life.
I remember my paternal grandad sharing stories of the horse and plough. Making hay or harvesting wheat would have taken a village in his time, with extended family and neighbours all lending a hand. One hundred years ago more than half the labour force was working on the land and consequently help was always on hand. Cue technological developments and societal change and today, just 4 per cent of the workforce is employed directly in the agricultural sector. Farming is now an increasingly isolated occupation. The sector is experiencing severe labour shortages, not to mention an ageing labour force, with just 4.3 per cent of farmers under the age of 35. The granting of planning permission for one-off rural housing, not just for the farmer or successor but to other family members, is vital to ensuring a necessary support network is maintained.
And while planners and professors may warn of housing sprawl or the return of bungalow blitz, we are not asking for rogue one-off houses but considered, well-thought-out liberalisation of the rural planning guidelines. Cost of services is repeatedly flagged as a concern should the guidelines be relaxed but our young people are and have always been willing to pay for connections to services. Environmental impacts linked to greater reliance on personal transport is another common argument yet many new-build homes now include an electric-car charging point. For every challenge we are presented with, our young people are adept and willing to overcome each one.
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Another stark difference between life now and then in rural Ireland centres on rural services. Rural towns and villages of old were the cornerstones of communities. Bustling village shops and dance halls brought people together. While farms may have been the foundation of rural Ireland, these towns and villages were its heartbeat but they are now dying. Local shops and pubs are closing, GAA clubs and schools are facing dwindling numbers, local halls remain idle. It’s not just access to housing that is making it difficult for young people to return to rural Ireland, it’s an inability to not just live in rural areas but thrive. Rural Ireland must not just be attractive to young people, it must service their needs. They must be able to work, live and raise a family. The Government must ensure the infrastructure and services available in rural areas are prioritised in collaboration with any changes to the rural planning guidelines.
Low supply, high demand and soaring costs have made it almost impossible for young people to purchase their own homes. Many are forced to return to their childhood bedrooms. Building a home of their own is just a hopeless, unattainable dream. Fortunately (or unfortunately considering how long we’ve campaigned for delivery of these guidelines), the power of change lies with our Government. Liberalising the rural planning guidelines to allow for one-off housing, particularly for young people from farming backgrounds building on family-owned land, is a vital step to securing the future of rural Ireland. Our young people want to return home, we want to live in rural Ireland – we just need the chance. Liberalisation of the rural planning guidelines will provide the only opportunity for many of us for a future in rural Ireland.
Josephine O’Neill is the national president of Macra, representing 16,000 members. She is in her early 30s and living in rural Ireland
No: Brendan O’Sullivan: A liberalised approach to individual rural houses will not go very far towards reversing rural decline, revitalising the rural economy or creating sustainable forms of rural employment
When it comes to one-off housing in Ireland, we tend to become aware of it only when a particular aspect of it reaches the headlines. For example, the length of time needed to reconnect all electricity customers in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn in January last year brought home to many people the real fragility of our rural settlement pattern.
With so many interconnected layers to the issue of individual houses in the countryside and so many long-standing political sensitivities around it, we should not be surprised that there is little real appetite for finding rational and coherent solutions. It is just too tricky. Belonging to a class of public policy issues that analysts describe as ‘wicked problems’, there is no agreement about the overall nature of the problem and no clear criteria for deciding whether it can be solved or not. Instead, our political culture seems to satisfy itself with bringing forward incomplete ‘solutions’ from time to time often based on deliberately narrow readings of the problem.
The issue is sometimes triggered by a misleading perception that farming families are finding it impossible to build a home on their own land and that planning is somehow preventing people from staying in their own rural locality. The only solution being proposed is a nationwide guideline on the relaxation of controls. In my view, this is an unwise and dangerous approach.
First, a liberalised approach to individual rural houses will not go very far towards reversing rural decline, revitalising the rural economy or creating sustainable forms of rural employment. These structural challenges are deep ones that need to be tackled at a different scale entirely, ie creating networks of strong rural towns and villages that can sustain the populations, jobs, services and infrastructure that rural areas need.
Secondly, it assumes that all rural areas are alike and that the social, cultural and environmental implications are the same everywhere. In planning terms, we know that these can vary widely even within the same county with some rural settlements suffering population loss and others experiencing severe urbanising pressures.
Thirdly, it ignores the fact that all planning authorities in Ireland already allow quite generous exceptions for rural people to build homes on their own family land.
If we are serious about addressing this issue, we cannot look at it only from the point of view of an individual family’s aspirations to build a new home. If planning is about anything at all it is about serving the common good. It does this through making sure that change occurs in the right places and in ways that do not compromise future decisions. The fundamental problem is that we have consistently failed to apply this form of thinking to one-off houses.
The real costs of urban-generated housing in rural areas was first identified in An Foras Forbartha’s famous 1976 report on the topic. For 50 years though, this sprawl has continued. With many thousands of individual planning permissions being granted each year on un-serviced land, we have created a serious sustainability challenge for the country as a whole. This case-by-case approach – which prioritises the private good over the common good – has led to a pattern of development that is both scattered and unco-ordinated: a pattern that relies exclusively on private car use; is extremely expensive to serve with infrastructure; and creates chaotic commuting patterns that are difficult to manage.
It is strange to think that while Ireland has adopted impressive high-level commitments to sustainable development across many sectors, it has somehow failed to have an evidence-based, mature conversation about addressing this inherently unsustainable settlement pattern of ours. If we continue to focus only on making it easier to get planning permission then we are in effect deciding to continue this chaotic pattern and to promote a kind of non-planning that will not serve Ireland well in the long run. Wicked, indeed.
Brendan O’Sullivan is a senior lecturer at University College Cork’s department of planning
