The countryside is set to be destroyed over the next 10 years if the Government scraps planning restrictions on the proliferation of one-off houses, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
Official figures suggesting that one-off houses in rural areas account for 36 per cent of all new homes dramatically highlight the colonisation of the countryside by Bungalow Blitz.
The estimate of 18,000 one-offs out of a total of 50,000 new homes built in 2000 was based on ESB connections. To put this in perspective, it is the equivalent in straightforward numerical terms of six times the annual output of one-off houses in the whole of Britain.
Nobody can deny that the vast bulk of this form of housing here is urban-generated - in other words, it is built by people who have opted to live in rural areas and commute to work in cities or towns. They are in the countryside, but not of the countryside.
The sale of sites for bungalows has become a major source of revenue for farmers, generating as much as €810 million a year in untaxed capital gains.
Why bother keeping cattle or tilling fields when you can engage in such lucrative "site farming"? Thus there is a very substantial vested interest behind the lobby to lift planning restrictions. And because the returns to farmers are so significant, both the IFA and the ICMSA have rowed in behind the rural planning action groups spearheading this campaign.
Their champion at the Cabinet table is Eamon Ó Cuív, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. He sees dispersed housing in the countryside as a vehicle for rural regeneration, backed up by an accelerated Civil Service decentralisation programme.
According to him there will be a clear statement in the forthcoming National Spatial Strategy that "rural people with connections in the countryside will be allowed to build their own houses there" - even if they are working in offices, rather than on the land.
Planners have long recognised that the housing needs of people who are from a rural area and need to live there because of their work must be catered for. However it is clear that they are fighting a losing battle against the creeping suburbanisation of the countryside.
Mr Ó Cuív insists he is not endorsing Bungalow Blitz. In his view, new houses in rural areas should be more carefully integrated into the landscape and made less visually prominent by setting them back from road frontages; few professional planners would disagree.
One-off housing in rural areas however is inherently unsustainable. The proliferatioof septic tanks contaminates ground-water supplies, dispersed housing is more difficult and expensive to service and is car-dependent, generating traffic on inadequate rural roads.
Mr Ó Cuív is concerned to rectify the imbalance of development between Dublin, with its "critical mass" and ever-extending commuter belt, and the relatively depopulated west of Ireland, in particular. So are the planners involved in drafting the National Spatial Strategy.
They point to the experience of Denmark, another small but successful European country with a dominant capital city, and how the Danes managed to draw some of the heat away from Copenhagen and redistribute it by pursuing more balanced regional development.
With projections that the State's population could reach five million in 2020, the key issue they are trying to address is to accommodate as many of the additional people as possible in a limited number of growth centres which have the potential to develop their own critical mass.
It stands to reason that this cannot be done by permitting unrestricted development of housing in the countryside. Whatever Mr Ó Cuív may say, cities and towns are the nodes of civilisation and economic activity; they need to be reinforced and rejuvenated as the first priority.
If there is to be a laissez-faire