Careless planning in countryside stores up problems for everyone on this island

Sam McBride, Sunday Independent, February 9th, 2025

THE RIGHT TO BUILD SINGLE DWELLINGS ACROSS IRELAND IS SHORT-SIGHTED

For decades, lax planning has been destroying much of the Irish countryside. Some of this has involved corruption; more often, the reason is more prosaic — chronic short-sightedness. Already, we're paying heavily for this failure and that bill will be shackled to our descendants who, for generations, will find it almost impossible to rectify our failures.

The right to build single dwellings across rural Ireland is one of the few policies which unites most on the island, whether wealthy or poor, unionist or nationalist, northerner or southerner. Except in bogs or on mountaintops, single homes are scattered across almost the entirety of the island. So lacking in planning is this scattering of the population that most of these houses might as well have been the product of a giant tossing them out of the heavens.

The reason for this is both simple and understandable. Many Irish people are, at most, a generation or two from the land and they yearn at some deep level to have the space, freedom and clean air of a home in the countryside.

Visually, this has been disastrous for the landscape, meaning those who now move to build in a field are as likely to be looking at half a dozen bungalows as at a herd of cattle. Government policy tacitly encouraged this, based on the simplistic notion that all economic growth is good.

Twenty years ago, Frank McDonald and James Nix warned in their book, Chaos at the Crossroads, that Ireland risked becoming "a land where towns never end and countryside never begins”. The grotesque eyesore this has become in many areas is in some senses the least problematic aspect of such chaotic development.

Storm Éowyn has emphasised the vast future cost of this planning folly — a cost which will be borne by generations of our descendants for centuries into the future because once a house is in place it is almost impossible for the authorities to remove it. When it eventually crumbles, there is an overwhelming legal presumption in favour of being able to build on that spot again.

Over the last fortnight, isolated rural dwellings have been the most difficult to reconnect to the electricity grid. Last week I was in Monaghan to write at Annaghmakerrig, a beautiful spot set among the rolling drumlins, lakes and pasture of that county.

Storm Warning

However, as well as the incredible beauty, two things were unmissable — just how many houses there are dotted along every tiny country road in the area and the massive devastation wrought by the storm. Even where overhead cables had survived, in many cases heavy trees were leaning on the phone and electrical wires, which could snap at any point. This has happened across the island and as climate change worsens it's going to become routine.

A widely dispersed population involves a multitude of problems and that's why green belts are so strictly enforced in countries such as England. The provision of both public and private services to scattered rural dwellings is inefficient, harms the environment and bears a cost which for the most part is borne by the rest of society.

Getting bin lorries or parcel delivery vans or emergency services to a population this far apart takes far longer, uses more fuel and ultimately costs more. Getting public transport to a population this dispersed is utterly impossible, thus locking in private car use for much of the population. Getting people to hospital quickly in an emergency inevitably takes longer.

There are people who need to live in the countryside. As someone who grew up on a farm, I know that well. Advocating for stricter planning isn't about punishing rural dwellers, but about recognising that not everyone can, or should, live in the countryside. If we don't accept that, why have any planning at all?

Our ancestors might not have had to deal with climate change or the challenge of getting electrical cables up and down country lanes, but even without those factors they recognised the benefit of clustering rural properties in hamlets which provide security and social interaction.

Despite all our progress and the smugness it sometimes engenders, in this area we've regressed. Yet there is barely any debate about whether this policy should be changed. A few years ago, Lord Jeffrey Rooker — a Labour direct rule minister who'd united Stormont's politicians in opposition to his attempt to toughen the rules on building in the countryside — told me: "I never met a councillor or MP in Northern Ireland who believed in planning. I was once told 'if I own land, I should be able to do what I want on it'.”

‘Politically, it's absolutely toxic to say you oppose single dwellings in the countryside’

Former DUP minister Jim Wells — an atypical environmentalist in that party and a qualified planner — said: "Politically, it's absolutely toxic to say you oppose single dwellings in the countryside.”

Under the current policy, every Northern Ireland farmer can get a site for a house every decade — that means up to 25,000 extra houses in the countryside from that rule change alone, with other changes allowing development for those who aren't farmers.

At the time of writing, thousands remain without power some two weeks after Storm Éowyn.

As the storm clean-up continues, it's clear that there are practical measures which could reduce the likelihood of electrical failures happening on the same scale. Something as simple as cutting down every tree within falling distance of an electricity wire would have a drastic impact. But it would also have a drastic impact on the environment — and a hefty bill.

The reality is that if a large percentage of the population wants to live far away from others, many of those consequences will spill over into the entire population.

Environment Minister Darragh O'Brien says that there will now be investment in the electricity grid to make it more resilient to the bigger and more frequent storms we know are coming.

For many of us, living without electricity for a fortnight is almost unimaginable and these people have suffered genuine distress.

Blaming the ESB for not doing more to repair broken lines is understandable. But the real culprit is elsewhere — and means this is going to happen again and again and again.