A register of "serial objectors" to one-off rural housing is likely to be set up in Kerry.
This follows a unanimous decision by council members to ask the Minister for the Environment, Mr Roche, for a ten-fold increase in the cost of fees for anyone objecting to a development "outside of their local electoral area".
The same small number of names was consistently turning up on planning files objecting to developments and "making observations" on one-off rural housing, councillors have claimed.
These houses on family-owned lands were often 50 or more miles from the objectors' own homes, it was claimed. In many cases the council had granted permission, but when appealed to An Bord Pleanála by the objectors, the decision was overturned. The basic human need for shelter was not being met because of these objectors, the councillors said.
Some of the "serial objectors" were from "mysterious organisations" and a lot of objections were made for spurious reasons, said Fine Gael councillor Mr Tom Sheahan. He proposed the increase in fees. The county council had lost over €1.5 million on planning last year as between two and four staff had to work on each objection, he said.
Mr Sheahan said An Taisce, too, had "overstepped its remit".
"They will object to a one-off house, but a small distance away where there's a big development, there will not be a word," he said.
Mr Michael Healy-Rae, Independent Fianna Fáil, said the handful of people continuously objecting were getting "cute".
"They don't say 'I wish to object', but they say 'I wish to make the following observation'. At the end of the year then, they can say they only objected to a small number of houses and the rest was observation. Could they not go away and observe something else?" he asked.
The mayor of Kerry, Mr Ned O'Sullivan, said there was an undeniable right to object for valid reasons but a category of nuisance objectors should be considered. This would mean that when a person objected to a development their name went on to a register.
The council is now to write to Mr Roche to increase the cost of objections to planning applications and they are to look into the matter of a register.
Mr Diarmuid Collins, secretary of An Bord Pleanála, said the board dismissed around 1 per cent or some 40 to 50 appeals in any given year because these were felt to be vexatious. Mr Collins defined "vexatious" as appeals based on non-planning issues.
However, there was no bias against people who made numbers of appeals. "The board's powers are quite specific. It must look at each appeal on its own individual merits. The fact that a person made 10 different appeals would not be considered vexatious," Mr Collins said.
Statistics issued by Kerry County Council yesterday showed that almost 300 houses or one quarter of the applications for one-off rural housing had been refused permission in the first seven months of 2004 in Kerry. Some 90 of the 252 multi-residential developments had been refused.
New measures to free up planning on family lands have been introduced.
