The relaxation of planning regulations on one-off rural homes flagged by the Government last week may appear to make sense. In the midst of a housing crisis, with young adults priced out of the market in their own localities and emigrants unable to return home, it could be argued that every available lever should be pulled.
But that would be to ignore the disastrous history of planning failure and exurban sprawl that has made Ireland an outlier not just in Europe but globally. At 26 per cent of all occupied dwellings, one-off housing already accounts for a share of national stock that no comparable country comes close to matching. Septic tank failures contaminate groundwater. Rural roads demand disproportionate maintenance budgets. The National Broadband Plan cost a fortune largely due to the dispersal pattern that successive governments have indulged. Every service the State provides, from school buses to ambulances to postal deliveries, costs dramatically more per head when the population is scattered across the countryside rather than concentrated in towns and villages.
There is a deeper paradox here too. The political argument for one-off housing rests on saving rural communities, yet the evidence points firmly in the opposite direction. When people live dispersed across the countryside and drive past their local village to shop in larger towns, the critical mass needed to sustain a post office, a school or a GP practice is never reached. The countryside fills with houses while the villages empty out.
This Government has been increasingly candid about how little weight it attaches to climate targets and sound planning practice. Ireland is already set to miss its emissions obligations by a very considerable margin, with financial penalties for the State to follow. When full details of the new proposals are published, they may prove to be the most blatant example yet of an administration willing to trade long-term damage for short-term political relief, dressing up a capitulation to planning populism as a solution to the housing crisis.
