This is shaping up to be quite a good Government, which does, by and large, what it says it will, frequently in the face of opposition from vocal vested interests. The latest evidence of such clarity is the announcement of proposals for sustainable rural housing, and the clear signal from the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, that these are to be regarded as urgent, writes John Waters.
For all the attempts of the usual suspects to disparage the initiative as cynical electioneering, this is good governance aimed at real human needs. With the increasingly prohibitive nature of the planning climate, which in some areas gravitated towards an outright ban on one-off rural housing, there was a growing realisation throughout the country that what was once regarded as a fundamental entitlement to settle and live where you wished - subject to reasonable regulation - was no longer to be a natural right.
Throughout what is termed "rural Ireland", people who would once have routinely sought permission to build homes on their family farms, had ceased to bother. There was a sense that the idea of freedom had been changed, that you no longer belonged where once you might have assumed a right to live and die.
This occurred because of a one-sided, undemocratic debate, conducted on the basis of metropolitanism, prejudice, spurious aesthetics, snobbery, dinner party politics and a fundamental lack of perspective on what life is about. This "debate", monopolised by busybodies, concealed interests and well-intentioned fundamentalists, lacked any sense of its moral or philosophical objectives.
A photograph published in this newspaper on Friday last conveyed the spurious essence of this malfunctioning discussion. It showed what the caption called "housing at Fanore in the Burren region of north Clare" - half-a-dozen innocuous-looking houses in a nondescript landscape, with some mountains in the background and a few cattle grazing between the buildings. Such photographs have played a central role in the sham debate which allowed unelected interests to interfere in the democratic process to guide public policy in accordance with their own narrow vistas. The photograph itself was, in a sense, neutral. But the semiotics, in accordance with an established grammar, contrived to communicate pictorially what was conveyed verbally in a headline further down the page: "Now it's open season for 'Bungalow Blitz'."
This was the heading also on an editorial in that day's edition, decrying the Government's initiative and opening with the claim that it is now "17 years since this newspaper coined the phrase 'Bungalow Blitz'". It is a dubious boast: the formulation of a sneer at the efforts of hard-working citizens to provide a decent life for themselves and their dependants. A bungalow, according to my dictionary, is "a one-storey house, sometimes with an attic". The word, denoting a particular type of building, is devoid of moral content. But the tenor of the discussion, together with the pejorative conclusiveness of the "Bungalow Blitz" smear, has been such as to suggest some kind of morally deficient lifestyle-choice imposed on the landscape by people of inferior taste.
A house is a technology, a basic element of the infrastructure of living. The human dwelling, in virtually any form, is an affront to the utopian perspective seeking some unspoilt landscape. Human beings, however, need housing. Once this is agreed, the shape or design of such housing can become an issue for discussion, but this will inevitably be prone to subjective apprehension regarding acceptable forms of affront. Such a discussion has not taken place properly, because the platform has been monopolised by an aesthetic fundamentalism based on untenable concepts of reality.
Notwithstanding red herrings about default suburbanisation, increased road traffic and groundwater contamination, the "Bungalow Blitz" smear reveals the essentially elitist nature of complaints about one-off housing. These are based not on genuine concerns over the public interest but on an effete snobbery underpinned by a visceral fear of the soil and those who live and breed upon it.
Present trends in rural housing, we are told - in a country with one of the lowest population densities in the developed world - are unsustainable. We are warned about the damage to our tourism industry. But which is more important: the citizen's right to a decent life, or the outsider's desire to come and gawp at a kitschified countryside?
The most manifest blitzkrieg of recent decades has been the imposition of an unnecessary and untrammelled urbanisation, which has brought the all-too predictable collateral characteristics of congestion, atomisation, alienation, criminality and addiction. Addressing these, I politely submit, is more urgent than any discomfort to the eyelines of metropolitan day-trippers seeking temporary refuge from their own alienating "choices".