One man’s planning battle to build a house on his own land in Co Kerry

Growing up in the west Kerry Gaeltacht, Breanndán Ó Beaglaoich could never have imagined he would spend his 60s battling for its survival. He’s a fifth-generation native of Baile na bPoc, a tiny village at the foot of Mount Brandon, its numbers depleted over the centuries by famine and emigration, and its traditions of language and music at risk of dying out.

Musician and teacher Ó Beaglaoich captures this decline with painted wooden crosses he brings with him as he campaigns for better planning for the Gaeltacht that would see Irish speakers like him being allowed to build where they were born — and keep Irish alive as a thriving language.

He returned to west Kerry after his separation and decided to build a tigín, a little house, on land inherited from his mother. He wanted to build a sustainable, passive house and unwittingly entered into a planning battle with Kerry County Council, which repeatedly refused him permission on the basis his proposed build would interfere with views and prospects.

After nine years of refusal, in 2015 he took matters into his own hands, bought an articulated truck and built a timber-framed passive house on the back of the truck — with the intention of driving the truck on to his land.

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[ Locals need not apply: a planning problem in west Kerry ]

A documentary, The Man With The Moving House, has been made about his struggle, from when he first got refused to the eventual overturning of Kerry County Council’s refusal by An Bord Pleanála in 2020.

While Ó Beaglaoich has another three years to build his house before the approval for planning runs out, he is seeking to retain the house he has already built and place it on to his site. “It’s my díseart,” (oasis) he says, every sentence he speaks peppered with Irish. It’s his first language and he maintains he doesn’t speak English at all, but Hiberno-English.

He moved the house on to his land in 2015, and the scenes in the documentary depicting the move are full of a rambunctious, life-affirming joy. Ó Beaglaoich hops up on to the cab of the tractor pulling the house into place, his accordion is thrown up to him and he deftly catches it, another fellah is thrown up on to the cab and they play the house home.

Once the house is manoeuvred, still on the flatbed of the truck, into the hollow he created for it, backing it into the glen as hills are called around here, champagne is popped and a small bit of step dancing ensues.

This excavation of the glen, where Ó Beaglaoich attempted to place his house so as not to interfere with the views, becomes the hook on which the council will hang him — for illegal construction.

An enforcement order follows, with the threat of two years in prison, a fine, or both. But to Ó Beaglaoich this fight is about much more than views and prospects, road access or sewerage. It’s about the fight for his village, the fight for his language, for the future generations who are crying out to build homes in the places they are from.

“I find it disheartening and I find it sad it’s being strangled at the source. I’m not speaking Irish because the Government helped me in any way, I didn’t go to classes to learn, I got it for free, and I want to pass it on freely, the way it was passed on to me.”

The protection of place is not only stifling the language, Ó Beaglaoich believes, it is also killing the future. In Baile na bPoc there used to be a population of 241. Now 12 people live there, the youngest a man in his 40s.

“What we are looking for is that our traditional clusters be viewed and accepted and be given the status of dwelling for people from that village. That there will be no outside people, no Airbnb — [just] homes for people to live in, full-time homes.”

In a cruel and unforeseen twist to Ó Beaglaoich’s story, the family home in Baile na bPoc burned to the ground last weekend. The fire service attended and did their best but the 300-year-old house could not be saved. “Everyone got out, but we are devastated. It’s a tragedy for my sister Eibhlin. It survived the famine, we were all born and reared there. A raging fire and a raging sea show no mercy.”

Kerry County Council says that 80 per cent of rural planning applications in the Dingle Gaeltacht have been approved in the last six years. The 20 per cent refused were for “very good reasons”: they were going to damage the landscape, or there were engineering problems.

For Ó Beaglaoich, the indivisibility of landscape and language is what he is fighting to preserve. “People come to west Kerry for the beauty. I see the beauty, but I want to speak, I want to laugh, I want to cry in my own language ... Planning is essential for Gaeltacht people. Otherwise you’ll have tourists down here, and the only people they’ll meet and talk to will be other tourists.”

The Man With The Moving House airs on RTÉ One on Thursday, August 25th, at 10.15pm