Conservationists and landowners are dug into their trenches, so how can we achieve a consensus on the landscape, asks Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Bungalow Blitz, as the suburbanisation of the countryside has been termed, features nowhere in the Heritage Council's policy document on Ireland's landscape, published yesterday. Yet it continues to consume and transform that landscape.
Even if the shocking statistic that 36 per cent of the total output of new housing consists of one-off houses in the countryside may be exaggerated, the suburbanisation of rural Ireland now under way is unprecedented in its pace and scale.
There are huge vested interests at stake, which explains why the argument between An Taisce and the ad-hoc rural planning forums has become so visceral. Quite simply, farmers want to continue to make big killings from the sale of house sites.
According to the authors of After the Celtic Tiger, the average capital gain per site is €45,000. And on the basis that 18,000 one-off houses are developed annually, they calculate the aggregate capital gain to landowners at €810 million.
Against that backdrop, it is hard to imagine how a consensus can be achieved on how to protect the landscape from colonisation by urban-generated housing - whether individual "trophy houses" or suburban housing estates in the middle of nowhere.
Yet the Heritage Council is right in arguing that we at least need to characterise the Irish landscape in a systematic way so that we know what we are dealing with. And that this characterisation should cover the whole countryside, not just special places.
"Without such baseline information, we are unable to measure change, unable to establish indicators for change and cannot fully justfy the effectiveness - from an environmental point of view - of other policies which impact on the landscape," the council says.
These policies range from tax incentives such as those which apply in the Upper Shannon Rural Renewal Area to the Common Agricultural Policy and Rural Environmental Protection Scheme and the National Development Plan, notably its motorway programme.
According to the Heritage Council, the "characterisation" process can be used to shift attention from a preoccupation with designating special areas of conservation towards a more holistic approach to managing landscape protection and change.
Neither the council nor the long-delayed National Spatial Strategy - now expected in September - can afford to ignore the threat that there will be few landscapes left to conserve in 10 years at the current rate of Bungalow Blitz.