It is now 17 years since this newspaper coined the phrase "Bungalow Blitz" to describe what was happening in rural Ireland, particularly in Connemara and other once-scenic areas along the western seaboard. Since then, tens of thousands of one-off houses have been shovelled into our landscapes - most of them "urban-generated", built by people who work in nearby cities or towns.
Official figures in 2001 showed that one-offs accounted for more than one-third of the State's output of housing annually.
This pattern of development is clearly unsustainable, not least because what it entails is the suburbanisation of the countryside. The Coalition Government now proposes, in its mis-titled draft guidelines on "Sustainable Rural Housing", to intensify current trends by making it even easier for prospective house-builders to get planning permission for one-off houses in rural areas. The guidelines also facilitate the lucrative sale of sites for such development.
Already, 85 per cent of all applications for this type of housing are granted by local authorities. But 90 per cent of the relatively few cases appealed by An Taisce are turned down by An Bord Pleanála for sound planning reasons, such as the need to protect groundwater supplies from contamination by the proliferation of septic tanks.
Nobody would argue with the right of farmers to provide sites for their sons and daughters to build new homes on their own land, provided they are well sited and designed. But most of what is built, including increasingly ostentatious mansions, has nothing to do with meeting genuine rural housing needs.
Neither have the holiday homes dotted all over counties Donegal, Galway and Kerry, to name but three. But the new guidelines mean that anybody would be eligible to seek permission to build a house in rural areas suffering population decline purely because they wished to do so. The Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, has defended this laissez-faire approach on the basis that it will encourage more balanced regional development, in line with the National Spatial Strategy.
If the Minister was really serious about implementing that strategy, he would be seeking to reinforce the gateways and hubs it identified by locating new housing in these urban centres. His own document implicitly accepts this by referring to stronger rural areas as areas where population levels are generally stable within a well-developed town and village structure, supported by a traditionally strong agricultural economic base.
That is surely what we should be striving for throughout rural Ireland - not the declaration of an open season for dispersed, almost wholly car-dependent housing in the countryside. Under the Fischler reforms, many farmers will be compensated for managing the landscape. It would be a tragedy if that landscape - the main asset of our tourism industry - were to become even more disfigured than it already is by a reckless relaxation of the planning code.