Report Paul Murphy
Any Government plan for a shake-up of rural housing should include a provision to allow people living in urban areas of villages to build houses in the rural area, a Fine Councillor has declared. Kells Municipal District Councillor Eugene Cassidy was speaking about plans by the Government to ease rules around rural housing as part of its drive to liberalise housing policy across the country.
At present, the granting of planning permission in rural areas is largely limited to those who are originally from that area, who have strong family links to a particular area or have an economic need to live there. Proposals before the Government would see local authorities being told to ease planning ruled for one-off homes in ribbon developments along main roads.
As part of county development plans Meath County Council had brought in guidelines for small clusters of houses in rural parts of the county. These were once known as “graigs” but in the last development plan are known as “nodes”.
Although discussion on rural housing revision has been going on in government for some time, the issue burst into public focus in an Irish Times article written by Senator Michael McDowell who wants the Government to “stop demonising one-off rural housing”. He says the Irish landscape was once dotted with rural housing but “the new orthodoxy disapproves of one-off rural homebuilding, save in exceptional circumstances”. In that new orthodoxy there is a demand for new houses to be located in towns or villages rather than scattered across the countryside.
Cllr Cassidy, who represents a largely rural municipal district has shared his views on rural housing with Meath Live. He says that a lot depend on what the Government has in mind for rural housing. He says that there are rural planning guidelines for a reason and some o these needed to be reviewed. Some of the rules worked extremely well.
“It boils down to the fact that if you’re from a particular area you are entitled to live in that area but you can’t have what they did in Louth where they allowed housing to be built all along roads but locked all the land at the back of that. That’s why you have ribbon development”.
He said that Meath County Council had very good rural planning guidelines and “they do work well”.
He pointed out some of the anomalies in rural planning. He gave as an example the village of Drumconrath. He said that people from the urban part of the village could not get housing in that sector but they can’t build in the rural part of the parish. As a result young people were often having to move to either Ardee or Kingscourt. “That has a serious knock-on effect for the next generation because what has happened is that all the young people have moved out of an area. The population is getting older and it affects the football teams of the future and basically the whole parish”.
That was one of the biggest issues for him. Young people from a parish could very often not be able to live in that parish. “If it’s a low pressure development area like over in Drumconrath people should be able to move from the urban part of the parish to the rural part”.
In relation to the “nodes”, formerly names “graigs”, which provided for small groups of houses in rural areas he said that while they were still part of the planning process and some areas had these provision, people were “stull entitled to build in their own parish”. “You don’t need to be shoved into a node or a graig because they are not fully serviced.”
