Tourism, transport and employment is key to successful rural development, Green Party deputy leader Mary White said today.
The party's Balancing Rural Developmentpolicy document, unveiled in Kilkenny today, proposes a rural enterprise agency to co-ordinate spending and encourage new business opportunities.
Despite the numbers in full-time farming steady declining, Ms White said there were new opportunities in areas such as teleworking, farm-based tourism and leisure; and organic food and renewable energy crops.
"We would also undertake an enterprise audit to review redundant buildings, suitable for a network of enterprise infrastructure," Ms White said, citing the recently closed sugar factories in Carlow and Mallow as examples.
Rural population decline had been halted in recent years largely because people unable to afford homes in urban areas were locating further from their place of work.
Ms White said the party's policy was aimed at creating sustainable development so "communities develop in their own right - not just as commuter dormitories."
Deirdre de Burca, a general election candidate in Wicklow, said planning regulations to require clustered development would discourage urban-generated housing "which inflates the price of new housing for rural people".
She also proposed an analysis of rural travel patterns so as to create an integrated transport network of buses and trains, with significant investment to improve frequency and number of routes.
Rural transport is likely to be an election issue after publicans in recent months claimed that already high levels of pub closures in rural areas would be added to unless some form rural transport initiative was established.