A leading campaigner for rural housing in Ireland has advised Irish-Americans to "go to places like Scotland" if they want to see the kind of unspoiled scenery portrayed for years in Bord Fáilte advertisements.
Mr Jim Connolly, spokesman for the Irish Rural Dwellers' Association, which has campaigned for a relaxation of planning restrictions on one-off houses in the countryside, made the remark in an interview with The Irish Letter.
Published in New York, the subscription newsletter, which bills itself as "the Irish-American's Connection to Ireland", contains a lengthy article in its current issue on the "bungalow blitz", asking if it meant "Goodbye to the Countryside".
"These days, Americans who visit Ireland's countryside come back singing a slightly different tune", it says. "The people, the pubs, the humour are as great as ever. But there's less talk about the scenic beauty, and more about the scatter-shot home-building that's rapidly eating up the landscape.
"In real estate terms, a kind of 'perfect storm' is going on in Ireland that combines sudden wealth with a decline in farming, weak zoning laws and a popular architectural style that looks wildly out of place. It's threatening to turn west Ireland, in particular, into one of Europe's less attractive suburbs."
According to The Irish Letter, the economic boom of recent years "has set off a land-grab as intense - if no quite as large - as America's housing boom after World War II". And what's going on "will eventually be seen as a catastrophe", Mr Ian Lumley, of An Taisce, is quoted as saying.
Describing Mr Connolly as "the best-known voice against tighter zoning laws", the article says he "stands hard by the cultural argument" that the traditional Irish townland for thousands of years was "a scattered community, although its people are tightly knit".
He argues that Ireland has the lowest housing density of any country in Europe. "I'm not opposed to any kind of control, but what's missing is an understanding of the culture of people in an underpopulated country". But the article says he is "vague" on what controls he favoured.
As for any negative impact the unrestricted development of rural one-off houses might have on the tourism industry - now Ireland's second largest, providing jobs for 150,000 people - Mr Connolly says, simply: "If people want to see the green fields, they should go to places like Scotland."
Asked yesterday if this was his view, Mr Connolly said it was an "off-the-cuff remark" in the context of what he described as the "desertification" of the Scottish highlands as a result of these areas being "denuded of people" by clearances and, more recently, large corporations. "The entire rural part of Scotland is owned by 1,200 people only", he told The Irish Times. "But at least one of them is considering sub-dividing thousands of acres into 50-acre lots to encourage young farmers into the area. Tourism disappears where there's no people."
