Will new rural housing guidelines protect the countryside or herald a builders' free-for-all, asks Lorna Siggins, Western Correspondent
It has been called "anywhere architecture", and it doesn't require detailed maps or road signs to locate it. Architect Melville Dunbar's recent reference to "car-dominant, serried ranks of dwellings" designed on the "discount-style ubiquitous box" could apply to any part of 21st-century Ireland - including the 18th-century Galway Gaeltacht village of Barna.
Barna? That hilly, hummocky former fishing village overlooking the Burren, where Connemara turf boats often sheltered from storms? Surrounded by "clachán", or nucleated clusters of dwellings, each vying for a better glimpse of Galway Bay? Yes, Barna, where current and approved planning applications amount to some 460 new houses, new shops, bars, restaurants, a hotel - eight times the maximum deviation allowed in the Galway County Development Plan.
Even as a pre-draft plan for the village gathers dust in Galway County Hall, the community of less than 2,000 people has been earmarked for the equivalent of four times the size of its six-year allocation of housing.
Significantly, two planning applications lodged last year involved building three- to five-storey blocks within just 30 metres of the high water mark. Residents who have united to form an action group, Pobal Bearna, chaired by Enda Folan, have called for an inquiry and for a freeze on all large-scale development until a proper area plan is in place.
"Is it any wonder that many people who are faced with the choice of living in an urban 'box' - as already under construction in Barna - would prefer to live in the 'country', and put up with the extra costs involved in planning, building, commuting, together with the hidden anti-social environmental costs of so doing?" says Derrick Hambleton, chairman of the Galway branch of An Taisce.
Hambleton is seriously concerned about the new guidelines on rural housing published this week by Minister for Environment Dick Roche, and believes they will be challenged in European courts. However, as a resident of the west of Ireland, he also understands the issue of that little "one-off house" in the countryside is far more complex than has been presented in some quarters.
For example, although Roche wants to welcome back emigrants, "immigrants" are not catered for, nor even mentioned. Not too far "back west" in Connemara, there are instances where people have moved to an area, set up a business, even a professional practice, have reared their kids through Irish, bought a site - but then found themselves trapped in rented accommodation, and repeatedly refused permission to build, because they cannot demonstrate "housing need".
Countering this are occasions where landowners have been granted planning for sites for the "family", but have not been sanctioned for failing to honour the "enurement clause" which prevents disposal of the property before a fixed period.
According to Co Mayo planning consultant: "There's no will, no support or resources for planners, and no projection of rural Ireland and of the nature of communities in 50 years' time. This is a cynical, populist exercise. How can the Minister present guidelines without an overall vision?"
PADHRAIG CAMPBELL, SPOKESMAN for Pobal Bearna, believes the debate is not simple. "The price of property is such that the younger generation could never hope to live in their community, unless they got a site from a family member. What sort of social model are we creating, if we split up families in this way, don't take into account social needs, and swamp some communities with housing estates while bleeding others dry? A developer-led society is not the model," he says.
Pobal Bearna members are familiar with the "doublethink" reflected in the plethora of "second homes" on the west coast which are empty for most of the year, but owned by urban residents who object to fish farms, salmon driftnetting, other houses and developments which might help to sustain their part-time "locality". Galway city and county has one of the highest rates of vacant homes, at more than 26 per cent of all housing. Roundstone is one of the more extreme examples, with more than 40 per cent of permanent dwellings not permanently occupied.
The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) recently proposed a property tax on second homes.
The Minister's guidelines seek to limit second homes in sensitive areas, while proposals to refurbish or conserve existing, ruined or disused houses will be "looked on favourably" by the planning authority.
Other more positive aspects of the guidelines, which have been criticised as a "builders' free-for-all" by Green Party spokesman Ciarán Cuffe, include the provision that new houses shouldn't be permitted along national primary or secondary routes.
Yet there is general acceptance that the new "flexibility" sought for approvals in Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and other designated areas is bound to be abused, in spite of the rider that such developments should have no adverse effect on the "integrity" of the area. "The Minister seems to have forgotten that Ireland ratified and signed up to the European Landscape Convention in 2004," Hambleton says.
OTHER CONDITIONS IN the regulations may be subject to legal challenge, given the recent Law Society of Ireland's report which warned that returned emigrants should be given special preference only in a "very limited way". The report found that Irish language proficiency conditions - attached to planning approval in some Gaeltacht areas - were constitutional. However, "bloodline" conditions, which discriminate between relatives of local residents and non-relatives, contravened the Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and EU law.
Significantly, the Irish Rural Dwellers' Association (IRDA) has given the Minister's guidelines a qualified welcome and says it needs to study them more closely.
Jim Connolly of the IRDA says the initiative has loosened up areas such as the "sterilisation" of farmland, where owners want to build on more than one site on their property, but can currently get planning permission for only one site. "These are only guidelines," Connolly says. "Local authorities are encouraged, but not obliged, to adopt them, and in the end it comes down to the decision of the individual planner.
"The IRDA and the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland made a joint appeal to the Minister late last year for a regulatory authority for planning, but he has failed to deliver on this," Mr Connolly says.
"An Bord Pleanála is not a regulatory body, and the Minister seems to think that he can make planners comply with his view by holding proposed regional seminars and by force of personality. That's not going to work - he could be moved in the morning."