Our "beautiful" country, one-off houses and derelict towns

MT

Does anyone else share my annoyance with the discription people fall back on when they seem to have concluded that so much about Ireland sucks? 'Ah, but sure atleast 'tis a beautiful country', 'no matter about the economy, we still have our countryside'... I'm paraphrasing here.

I've holidayed and travelled quite a bit around northern Europe and I can only say that there's now a stark difference in the appearance of Ireland compared to Denmark, Germany, or even Wales. The other countries with verdant, lush landscapes like our own have preserved the beauty of their countryside by only allowing those who work the land to live in it. They've done this with such shocking/radical policies such as green belts, national parks, and a PLANNING policy that actually PLANS were people live.

In Ireland, by contrast, for decades now there has been a free-for-all. With the exception of mountain tops it seems that no land is off limits for housebuilding. As a result there's a shocking lack of unspoilt rural scenary left. Leave a town and cowshed sized houses seem to follow you up every road and graze in just about every field. Coming back from Europe now it hits me how so much of the countryside here is now utterly fugly.

Does anyone else find the swamping of the rural landscape with one-off houses - regardless of size - god awful unsightly? And if not, have they ever travelled to Denmark, Sweden, Wales, France, Germany, Scotland, England, etc.? And if they have, and they still think 'aw but shure Ireland's beautiful and picturesque', do they think that the preserved landscapes in these places, free from housing, are somehow more unsightly than what we've contrived to allow happen here?

And unlike their landscapes which will be preserved indefinately unless there is a drastic change in policy, our's continue to become ever more suburbanized. Each year thousands more one-off houses receive "planning permission" (there's a laughable term if ever there was one). I've read that since 1970 about 450,000 one-offs have been built across the Republic, with the guts of atleast another 100,000 across NI. At what point does anyone say stop? Or will people migrate out of towns and settlements indefinately over the coming century until the island's entire 6 million people live in one-offs? Without planning restrictions on where you can settle what's to stop such a prospect coming about if the will is there?

You might think that certain areas aren't too bad now but what will they look like after another few decades of one-offs and holiday homes? There seems to be no urgency that this is an on going process. The Cotswalds will look as they do 30 years from now but just about everywhere in Ireland is in a state of flux.

One thing I do now when travelling through the untouched scenary in other parts of Europe is wonder to myself what it would look like if the area had been under the control of an Irish county council for the past half century? Frankly, I shudder.

Why is it that decades ago a German, Welshman*, Frenchman, Swede, Austrian, Dane, Scotsman, Englishman, Norwegian, etc. could look at an untouched valley in their respective countries and think 'we should use a planning process to preserve such natural beauty for the whole nation for generations to come'?

Whereas the corresponding Irish attitude seems to have been, well, take your pick... 'jayz, great place for a site'; 'me uncle Seanie left me land in that there valley and to hell with anybody trying to stop me building'; 'I'm from a different valley so it's none of my business what they do in this one'; 'da left the farm to the five of us and although only Ciaran farms we all wanna house'; 'I wanna holiday home there'; 'sure without houses all over it it doesn't really look like proper countryside'; 'who do I have pull with to get planning?'; 'it's a disgrace that people are being hearded into the big schmoke, we need a new build house in every other field'; 'we've got to build up the rural population, we've just gotta, there should be a waiver from development restrictions in this area'; 'we need a factory in that valley to attract young people'; 'sure think a' the local builders, what'll they do for work?'; 'sure people up in Dublin are trying to ethnically cleanse the counryside of the rural folk', etc.

Why is Ireland so different (no doubt patriots will tell us that's a good thing to)? Why do people persist in the fantasy that this is still the beautiful country that it undoubtedly was in the early 20th century?

*or woman

Dravokivich

Nope

ballsymchugh

frank.

orourkeda

As someone once said if the dutch had Ireland they'd feed the world and if the irish had the netherlands they'd all drown

martic

Is this your first book to write?

squod

Ireland compared to Denmark, Germany, or even Wales.

Lol. Stopped reading about there. Know where I'd go .........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU6VBTGjYkk

claddy

A lot of people in Ireland like to stay away from urban area's as they try to avoid condesending people like you.

doomed

"You can't eat scenery" must be one of the most stupid comments ever made. Easy to see why the golden goose fairytale is not irish. We'd have eaten him straight away.

gigino

i agree with the original poster 100%

In time everyone will see the folly of so much one off housing scattered everywhere. It is bad for our environment, is slowly ruining our tourism industry, and is not economical in terms of services, post etc etc
Too much fossil fuel is spent commuting / going to shops etc.

amacachi

You can dere-lict my balls.

Duckworth_Luas

I lost interest at Chapter 1 Verse 1, "In the beginning God created boredom"

mikemac

We have one of these threads over in Politics and there is always one going over in Infrastructure
The OP is here since 2004 so knows this better then me. But choose to come start a thread in After Hours instead

You don't live in rural Ireland and own any land. Maybe the best solution is create national parks so the city folk can go there at weekends and not dictate what other people and councils do.

Do you remember Mayo Council or Clare Council dictating to Dublin County Council? I don't. So worry about your own area city boy

An Taisce is an organization for busy bodies, join them

starbelgrade

orourkeda wrote: »

As someone once said if the dutch had Ireland they'd feed the world and if the irish had the netherlands they'd all drown

An amusing quote, but like the OP's post, while there's a certain amount of truth to it, it really doesn't tell the full story.

Firstly, one-off housing isn't as easy to get planning for as you would think. There was a time when you could pull a politician to do a favour for you to get planning through, but there are now strict guidelines for rural development which means that there must be a local need for one-off housing & all new houses must be built in relation to their natural environment in terms of design and site suitability for services.

Secondly, 65% of Ireland's land is used for the purposes of agriculture, with a further 10% of that being used for forestry. That means that only a quarter of Ireland's land mass is used for all other uses ie., housing, commercial, industrial etc.

And thirdly, agriculture in Ireland accounts for 3% of GDP, which is twice that of the EU average. Our beef exports alone account for 60% of all beef consumed in France.

So while it may look like Ireland is totally covered in houses & that we can barely produce enough food to feed ourselves, nothing could really be further from the truth.

Duckworth_Luas

orourkeda wrote: »

As someone once said if the dutch had Ireland they'd feed the world and if the irish had the netherlands they'd all drown

Nobody important ever said that.

charlemont

Duckworth_Luas wrote: »

Nobody important ever said that.

Nobody important needed to say it as everybody knows its very true.

Daegerty

Nothing wrong with one-off houses, its nice to think that people are living in these places and making the most of them. A lot of them built during the tiger years are quite ugly but thats another story.

Maybe there are a few too many in places but really they don't bother me

mikemac

orourkeda wrote: »

As someone once said if the dutch had Ireland they'd feed the world and if the irish had the netherlands they'd all drown

charlemont wrote: »

Nobody important needed to say it as everybody knows its very true.

More self hate, I suppose we can't achieve anything in Ireland....

You're forgetting the Dutch had a boom and bust on the price of tulip bulbs.
Even a housing boom and bust makes more sense then that, stupid Dutch.

And I suppose you missed when Ireland was a poor nation emerging from civil war we had the largest hydro electric plant in the world in Ardnacrushna. Just to show what can be achieved.

Daegerty

feelingstressed wrote: »

And I suppose you missed when Ireland was a poor nation emerging from civil war we had the largest hydro electric plant in the world in Ardnarcrushna. Just to show what can be achieved.

Very little can be achieved nowadays and its mostly down to inferiority complex and lack of morale.

If a new hydroelectric plant had to be built or a nuclear one it would be contracted out to some massive foreign company with the notion that we couldn't pull together the skills and the resources needed for it ourselves.

HalloweenJack

OP, I've been around Wales and England and they do have plenty of stand alone houses there. Just get the train from Holyhead to Crewe and you'll see plenty of them. Or you can drive around the Lake District or the Moors of Yorkshire where there are stand alone houses that are hundreds of years old.

IIRC, they have, admittedly less, stand alone houses in Spain too. This isn't a specifically Irish thing so stop banging on as if it is.

starbelgrade

Daegerty wrote: »

A lot of them built during the tiger years are quite ugly but thats another story.

That's very true. There was a time where people were buying plans off the internet or from the likes of "Bungalow Bliss", then giving them straight to some plank of an engineer to submit them for planning, without any concept of design or any thought for the Irish vernacular buildings or care for the surrounding landscape.

The best thing about the "downturn" is that many county council planning departments have been very active in recent years in cutting down on this type of thing & have actively being producing guidelines on more suitable & sustainable styles of building.

MT

feelingstressed, there's definately an element of Irish parochialism that sit's uneasily with the idea of liberal democracy. Democracy is communal. We don't all go our own way like cats at a crossroads.

The entire community elects a government to govern for all of us. If people in Mayo decided to suspend the right to trail by jury, should Dubliners keep their noses out? If folks in Roscommon wish to restrict the franchise solely to men, no business of Dubs? Kerry people think there should be no speed limits, hell, who are the rest of us to say otherwise. Heck, if people in Donegal want to drink and drive, that's up to them and solely them.

Why unearth should someone who lives 5 miles from a piece of land have more say on how the law applies to it than someone who live 50 miles away? Or do you have a particular distance in mind for the radius of your democratic exclusion zone? Could Dubs comment on land use in north Fingal, if not Kerry? And what about citizens living in Cork city, is their democratic say suspended a mile or so outside city limits?

Well, we all know where you would have stood in the American civil war. "Butt out Lincoln and don't you be dictating to the Georgia state government. Worry about your own area Abe, we're not making your boys own slaves. So why should you tell us who we can and can't own?"

You do realise that Ireland is so small that many people in other countries would find it laughable that someone here could be considered too remote to have a say on what goes on in other parts?

If oil was discovered in Dublin bay should the corporation tax and other taxes levied be spent solely in the Fair City?

You don't live in rural Ireland and own any land.

So you supported the policy of the Unionist Stormont government when it restricted the franchise to property owners? After all, if you didn't own any land there why should you have had a say?

Oh, and by the way - not that it should give my opinion more weight than anyone else's - I do live in rural Ireland. Through no choice of my own, I grew up in the equivalent of a one-off - a very old renovated rural house. And I now live in a small rural town.

Daegerty

starbelgrade wrote: »

That's very true. There was a time where people were buying plans off the internet or from the likes of "Bungalow Bliss", then giving them straight to some plank of an engineer to submit them for planning, without any concept of design or any thought for the Irish vernacular buildings or care for the surrounding landscape.

The best thing about the "downturn" is that many county council planning departments have been very active in recent years in cutting down on this type of thing & have actively being producing guidelines on more suitable & sustainable styles of building.

I think a house should be designed to blend in with the landscape not a huge fck off of a house surrounded by an area of Tarmac in the middle of nowhere and a '07 Navara (or a dreaded Q7 outside)

The worst has to be those fooking 'dormer' yokes. They ruin the look of any house instantly and start leaking once the 3-month warranty on your house runs out

Duckworth_Luas

charlemont wrote: »

Nobody important needed to say it as everybody knows its very true.

Really? Care to provide any proof as to its veracity?

This "quote" gets attributed to many people. Churchill, Hitler, Bismark, Thatcher, however nobody can find a source. Luckily it's found a home in AH. Here it can be repeated forever and people will believe it.

starbelgrade

Daegerty wrote: »

I think a house should be designed to blend in with the landscape not a huge fck off of a house surrounded by an area of Tarmac in the middle of nowhere and a '07 Navara (or a dreaded Q7 outside)

The worst has to be those fooking 'dormer' yokes. They ruin the look of any house instantly and start leaking once the 3-month warranty on your house runs out

A lot of rural development plans are stipulating that houses must blend into the landscape or surrounding housing & some counties have even gone so far as outlawing dormer houses.

Which, I agree is a good thing.

squod

Daegerty wrote: »

...... contracted out to some massive foreign company

You overestimate the PS. Some goon would just ring the usual yokels from Norn Iron.

Brendan Flowers

But what about my road frontage?







*Note: This comment may not make any sense, I couldnt be arsed reading the OP's entire post*

mikemac

MT wrote: »

The entire community elects a government to govern for all of us. If people in Mayo decided to suspend the right to trail by jury, should Dubliners keep their noses out? If folksá in Roscommon wish to restrict the franchise solely to men, no business of Dubs? Kerry people think there should be no speed limits, hell, who are the rest of us to say otherwise. Heck, if people in Donegal want to drink and drive, that's up to them and solely them.

You're being hysterical now.
My post was on planning, the whole thread is on planning, hey you started the thread.
Speed limits, voting rights and trial by jury? Why don't you drag in capital punishment for County Clare to go with this hysterical rant while you are at it.

MT wrote: »

Well, we all know where you would have stood in the American civil war. Butt out Lincoln and don't you be dictating to the Georgia state government. Worry about your own area Abe, we're not making your boys own slaves. So why should you tell us who we can and can't own?

Well I think the American Civil War is offtopic for this thread but yes, I would have supported the confederates and state's rights.
As did many Irish and there were Irish Confederate Regiments.

But revisionist history tells us the whole civil war was over slavery :rolleyes:

onlyrocknroll

feelingstressed wrote: »

More self hate, I suppose we can't achieve anything in Ireland....

I couldn't agree more. All self questioning and criticism is necessarily self hate, and therefore wrong. We most ask no questions about what wrong right during the boom years and get back to reckless wonderful lending.











Not necessarily agreeing with OP, just pointing out absurdity of this argument.

rainbowdrop

MT wrote: »

feelingstressed, there's definately an element of Irish parochialism that sit's uneasily with the idea of liberal democracy. Democracy is communal. We don't all go our own way like cats at a crossroads.

The entire community elects a government to govern for all of us. If people in Mayo decided to suspend the right to trail by jury, should Dubliners keep their noses out? If folks in Roscommon wish to restrict the franchise solely to men, no business of Dubs? Kerry people think there should be no speed limits, hell, who are the rest of us to say otherwise. Heck, if people in Donegal want to drink and drive, that's up to them and solely them.

Why unearth should someone who lives 5 miles from a piece of land have more say on how the law applies to it than someone who live 50 miles away? Or do you have a particular distance in mind for the radius of your democratic exclusion zone? Could Dubs comment on land use in north Fingal, if not Kerry? And what about citizens living in Cork city, is their democratic say suspended a mile or so outside city limits?

Well, we all know where you would have stood in the American civil war. "Butt out Lincoln and don't you be dictating to the Georgia state government. Worry about your own area Abe, we're not making your boys own slaves. So why should you tell us who we can and can't own?"

You do realise that Ireland is so small that many people in other countries would find it laughable that someone here could be considered too remote to have a say on what goes on in other parts?

If oil was discovered in Dublin bay should the corporation tax and other taxes levied be spent solely in the Fair City?


So you supported the policy of the Unionist Stormont government when it restricted the franchise to property owners? After all, if you didn't own any land there why should you have had a say?

Oh, and by the way - not that it should give my opinion more weight than anyone else's - I do live in rural Ireland. Through no choice of my own, I grew up in the equivalent of a one-off - a very old renovated rural house. And I now live in a small rural town.

This is After Hours OP:

http://rob.nu/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/why4.jpg

MT

Nothing wrong with one-off houses, its nice to think that people are living in these places and making the most of them.

I don't think that making the most of a development would be a good condition for letting it pass. Would you be content if someone built a collection of twenty storey flats in several fields and filled them with tenants that made the most of them? Would it be acceptable for a developer to bulldose Trim castle and build a hotel on the site provided he could make the most of it?

ejmaztec

One off houses aren't so bad, but the construction of driveway entrances the same size as the Parthenon in front of some piddling sized house should be banned.

mikemac

onlyrocknroll wrote: »

I couldn't agree more. All self questioning and criticism is necessarily self hate, and therefore wrong. We most ask no questions about what wrong right during the boom years and get back to reckless wonderful lending.

Just post what you want to state and don't wrap it up in editing posts or trying to be clever and using strike throughs or small text
Sick of this FYP nonsense, always from posters who won't post their own opinion

If you have an opinion then post it. And then we'll debate it

Daegerty

MT wrote: »

I don't think that making the most of a development would be a good condition for letting it pass. Would you be content if someone built a collection of twenty storey flats in several fields and filled them with tenants that made the most of them? Would it be acceptable for a developer to bulldose Trim castle and build a hotel on the site provided he could make the most of it?

No I dont want to see bloody flats in the middle of fields but I'd hate to see the opposite situation where the entire rural area is 'hands off' for when it comes to private housing.

And some of the more extremist Gormley type figures would have 100% of us lumped together in high rise city apartments to save a bit of fuel

mikemac

Ah John Gormley.
Mr sensible planning and reversed zoning in Laois. Dublin telling Laois what to do

But come election time he became Mr NIMBY and went to war on the incinerator. NIMBY indeed, a rat trying to save his seat

If the incinerator was in any other area he wouldn't have said anything during the election

Amtmann

The definitive Boards.ie thread on one-off housing is here.

MT

feelingstressed wrote:

You're being hysterical now.

Oh, dear. That's not much of a comeback. I favour the marketplace of ideas; you must be a subscriber to the 'down with that sort of thing' club.

feelingstressed wrote:

My post was on planning, the whole thread is on planning, hey you started the thread.
Speed limits, voting rights and trial by jury? Why don't you drag in capital punishment for County Clare to go with this hysterical rant while you are at it.

You introduced a general argument that city dwellers shouldn't comment on governance in rural areas. You specifically mentioned Dublin City Council vis a vis Mayo or Clare. You changed the terms of the debate and I simply responded in kind with analogies to other areas of law that allow for no exception in the communal decision making process. You haven't shown why we shouldn't all have a say concerning planning, just as we have with trial by jury, the franchise etc.

feelingstressed wrote:

Do you remember Mayo Council or Clare Council dictating to Dublin County Council?

Indeed, why if we all have an equal say over land use would any one area be dictating to another? Where has anyone flagged up the prospect of a Dublin Council drawing up planning laws for anywhere else?

Why shouldn't the entire Irish nation have a democratic say over what happens to the Cliffs of Moher or the Burren? Or should the people of Clare have exclusive control over their management and potential development?

Why should the process of communal decision making be suspended when it comes to the Irish people's use of the Irish landmass when it isn't for, say, how Irish people raise their kids? If you have children Dubs, and the rest of us, have a say on how they are educated, regardless of where you live.

And if I wished to be tangential, one of the things that has so damaged governance in Ireland is the intense localism of the county jersey that has placed the maintenance of the parish pump and the desire to elect corrupt chieftons for this end ahead of the collective good. So much of the countryside has been wrecked because land use, for some reason, has been cordoned off into this localist paradigm. Just as the suspension of collective oversight and responsibility has seen so much of the Irish nation's collective resources frittered away on parish pump spending, so too has there been a baleful effect on the landscape with the 'parish' prioritised at the expense of the rest of the community.

feelingstressed wrote:

Well I think the American Civil War is offtopic for this thread but yes, I would have supported the confederates and state's rights.
As did many Irish and there were Irish Confederate Regiments.

Guess those Irish were lucky they weren't black. I presume then that if a number of Irish counties wished to secede from the Republic you'd have no objections?

MT

ejmaztec wrote:

One off houses aren't so bad, but the construction of driveway entrances the same size as the Parthenon in front of some piddling sized house should be banned.

Regardless of how they are built this is often what you spend most of your time looking at when driving in the Irish countryside. Driveway entrance after driveway entrance after driveway entrance.

One of the great things about staying in, and I presume living in, a town or village in Scotland, Germany, Denmark, England, etc. is that the surrounding landscape acts as the settlement's lungs, if you like. A release from humanity where you can escape from development into the untouched wilderness. If I wanted to be really woolly I'd say unspoilt nature replenishes the sole.

This is what we are losing as the countryside around settlement after settlement in Ireland becomes crowded with an ever growing mass of one-off houses. Instead of cycling or driving past the peace of untouched field and forest, settlement pursues you everywhere. Rural roads are becoming lined with boundary walls, driveways and McMansions.

One of the things that is being lost when travelling in Ireland is the choice between distinct forms of scenary and the joy of anticipating the boundary between each. It is such a pleasure to drive along rural roads in Germany, Denmark, or England, absorbing a truly undeveloped landscape and then to climb to the brow of a hill or rise on a slight elevation in the road and see a compact town or a rural/urban boundary in the distance. You are able to appreciate the phenomena of human settlement and untramelled nature.

But as housing countinues to spew out along roads in Ireland - and Ireland has a much denser network of rural roads that allows for the development effects to be much more pronounced - we are losing the disctinction between rural and urban. And something has to give. If you build housing ever more expansively then towns - especially the smaller ones and villages that can't attract people - will go into population decline. This is accentuated by the fact that the very well-to-do types who would otherwise be influential in a town's upkeep are often the most likely to take flight to the McMansion in the surrounding hills. One-off housing is often a very middle class phenomenon. Small towns are hit by a double whammy of population decline and a loss of local initiative.

So travelling through Ireland will become like passing through a twilight zone of 'rurbanized' countryside and decaying towns seeping ribbon development in every direction. Get used to seeing nothing but an endless succession of driveways, cattlegrids, boundary walls and entrance pillars.

Agonist

I agree totally with the OP. It's symptomatic of the corruption that's been destroying the country since its birth.

We have planning laws and they have been twisted, abused and weakened by vested interests, without a squeak from the dept. of the environment. The acres of housing built on floodplains? It must be some kind of post colonian, mé féiner crap that we need to eradicate from the country. I hope civics classes in school are filling the children with outrage and the courage to overturn the gombeenism that's driven us into the ground.

JupiterKid

I also fully agree with the OP. Ireland seems not to be able to do proper spatial planning. Also, many if not most medium sized rural towns in Ireland have been held back, stunted and actually developed a "rough" reputation because of the disease of one off houses.

All borne by corruption, me-feinism, selfishness, greed and pig thick ignorance.

thebman

Maybe I'm the only one that finds a completely barren countryside with nothing but grass or bog as far you can see as not particularly beautiful.

If it is, you need like one of these areas and promote that rather than trying to preserve the whole country for it.

Personally I like the whole house every few miles things Ireland has. It lets me know that I'm in the middle of nowhere and can admire the scenario but if my car breaks down I have somewhere to go for help.

MT

Daegerty wrote:

No I dont want to see bloody flats in the middle of fields but I'd hate to see the opposite situation where the entire rural area is 'hands off' for when it comes to private housing.

Why do you not want to see flats in the middle of fields? Is it because you would consider such development unsightly? You'd accept then that there is a valid aesthetic argument? If I proposed the idea of building 450,000 stand alone houses across the countryside of just the Republic, would you consider that an unsightly prospect? Because that's what has gone ahead since 1970. And, frankly, we're at the stage were I'd settle for a few rural tower blocks instead of a city of one-offs housing more people than Belfast!

One of the problems of trying to get a handle on this is that it runs into two all too prevalent traits in Irish society: parochialism and myopia. The notion always seems to be put forward that it's only a few houses here and there. But if you add up all the heres and theres and the fact that this is an ongoing process - year in, year out - it turns out that there has been a heck of a lot of one-off houses built all over the place. That's how the equivalent of a city much bigger than Belfast has sprung up across the hills since 1970.

If we were just now experimenting with the idea of one-off housing, dabbling our toe in the water so-to-speak, the argument that there should be some latitude might seem reasonable. But far from 'hands off' the process has run amok. If the 450,000 one-offs, plus all those built prior to 1970, not to mention the multitude thrown up in NI, isn't too many then what's your upper limit? The rate of construction has increased so it'll only be a few decades before there's a million stand alone houses out there. When do you say stop?

Unfortunately, I think when people think about one-off house building they often focus on the rate of construction and not the accumulation of an ever growing total. And it's the latter that has such a pervasive visual impact. This is pretty much all new build with little replacment. It's not like the yearly car sales where most purchases see an accompanying older car taken off the road. One-off house building would be analogous to older cars having somehow remained on our roads even with all the new purchases. Can you imagine the congestion that there'd now be on the road network.

But I suppose we could have always built more road; we can't build more countryside.

Daegerty wrote:

And some of the more extremist Gormley type figures would have 100% of us lumped together in high rise city apartments to save a bit of fuel

Ah, yes... the straw man. The only settlement alternative to new build houses in the middle of fields are high rise flats in cities. There's nothing else in between, is there? No hamlets, villages, small towns, suburbs on the rural fringe of larger towns, heck, even city suburbs? So that's how they've done it in Denmark, France, Germay, Scotland, Sweden, Wales, Norway, England, the Netherlands, etc.

The extremists in those societies that have been instrumental in preserving the countryside have done so by herding the entire population into concrete city tower blocks, no doubt with a heroin addict lying in a puddle of his own urine in every stair well. It's a thought that would send a shiver down anyone's spine. But why don't all the Danish ghetto dwellers encased in vertiginous concrete rise up and rebel? Or at least attempt to flee to that last bastion of housing freedom on the European continent called Ireland?

Jesus Wept

One off houses? What is the issue here?

Yet another great opening post wasted on the collective minds of After Hours.. Could have been a great thread but instead we have insults. It really feels like the rest of the internet has leaked into boards.ie over the last year.. Doesn't feel much different to other forums anymore.

I've had a lot of ideas for threads recently but don't even bother starting them because I know there'll be twenty tossers ruining it.

onlyrocknroll

feelingstressed wrote: »

Just post what you want to state and don't wrap it up in editing posts or trying to be clever and using strike throughs or small text
Sick of this FYP nonsense, always from posters who won't post their own opinion

If you have an opinion then post it. And then we'll debate it

My opinion is that blaming all self questioning on self-hate is childish and reductive and unhelpful. How could we ever improve anything in Ireland if we leap on anyone who has an issue on how we live. People criticise their country because they love it, not because they hate it.

I don't have strong opinions on one-off housing because I'm a city dweller and don't feel very qualified to speak about it knowledgeably. However I am leaning towards those who argue against it.

It does have a negative effect on the landscape, which is vital for tourism and therefore our economic recovery, as well as marring something that is beautiful for its own sake.

It does detract from the cultural and social life in small towns, comparisons with other European countries were rural life is more concentrated make that obvious.

It also (apparently) causes infrastructural problems with broadband, pipes etc. I'm prepared to be corrected on this one because I've only heard this argument second hand. But it makes sense to me.

Edit - I didn't FYP.

maninasia

If you lived in Ireland over a 150 years ago you would have seen a lot more one off housing..mind you they were all about the size of a kitchen but still.

reprazant

feelingstressed wrote: »

Ah John Gormley.
Mr sensible planning and reversed zoning in Laois. Dublin telling Laois what to do

Was this not when he was Minister for Environment?

So, he was not a state minister but a Dublin TD who was telling Laois CC what to do?

What rubbish is this? IF Enda Kenny reverses some Dublin CC legislation, is that therefore Mayo telling Dublin what to do?

weiland79

I don't have a problem with stand alone houses as such.

But why are they always painted blue or yellow?

OneArt

I feel sorry for children who're going to grow up whilst living hours away from anywhere having to have mam and dad chauffeur them everywhere or have to fork out a lot of money to get a car just so they can have some semblance of a life.

Knasher

I'm curious OP, do you object to countryside housing purely for ascetic reasons? It seems to be you do and then you must surely object to other structures being built in the countryside for the same reason.

Are you similarly suggesting we drive cows in the town centre twice a day to avoid building milking parlours?

What I think you actually want to advocate is that we should end our system of small farming and move towards a system of very large farms like they have in other countries like England. Then you end up with most of the people working there being commuters and travelling from the nearest town. You still end up with structures, obviously and they end up being larger but more sparse.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to this model. It's just a more reasonable forum of argument than simply saying farmers should live in the towns because I don't like the look of their houses.

Interceptor

It took two years of negotiations with Galway Co. planning office so that I could BUY a one-off house in my rural area because they enforce enumeration clauses preventing people without a specific local need from OCCUPYING them. There are plenty of areas where one-off houses are discouraged but when the 'greener' alternative is a semi-D Celtic-tiger built shoebox in Claregalway or Athenry with inefficient public transport and gammy infrastructure then I'm voting with my wallet.

It depends where you look - I travel extensively in Europe for business and there are densely populated areas of all of the countries you list with one-offs, just maybe not on half-acre sites like we have here.

This country is for all of us - not just for the enjoyment of day-trippers from Dublin looking for a bit of scenery.

On a separate note, we keep 24 chickens, two pigs and two dogs in our garden - would you want us as neighbours. LOL

'cptr

Bogsnorkler

Astethics aside, I find that one off housing is getting increasingly unsustainable; economically, environmentally and socially.

Still imo we need to maintain the "integrity" of rural Irish life at the same time