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

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

thebman

Bogsnorkler wrote: »

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

Its not as unsustainable as many make out. I mean the guy commuting from a town 2 hours to Dublin every day in traffic is doing crap loads of damage to the environment too.

Most people are arguing about the unsustainable services that don't actually exist in most rural areas anyway or are paid for by the people living in those houses so are clearly not familiar with the idea of living in rural Ireland.

patneve2

maninasia wrote: »

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.

Very true, but 150 years ago our 'needs' in life were very different...for example: milk the cows, pick potatoes in the fields, walk to school, go to the market by cart...

in 2011 its more along the lines of: drive the kids to school, drive to shopping centre 15km away, drive to the cinema 20km way etc etc. Services then need to be built to reach these houses in the middle of nowhere: broadband, electricity, sewage, postal services, provision of roads....all costs more and more €.

On the other hand, the irish development pattern is historically way more dispersed that the Continental 'urban view of things' (especially in France, Spain and Italy). However, I really believe we all have to get a grip and accept the fact that continuing this 'dispersed settlement pattern' will only put us at a disadvantage, both economically and (more importantly) aesthetically.

and PS the houses built 150 years ago look Irish, most of the houses built in the boom look just pure s*it. Those design styles would be laughed at all over Europe, in my opinion.

EDIT: Concluding I would just like to remind all to be careful when talking about the country-side...The countryside shouldnt be viewed as a postcard where farmers smoke pipes and cows graze in the field. The countryside is also an active part of the built environment where people work. But I STILL believe that if proper planning had taken the place of greed in the last 15 years, quality housing could have been built with much less environmental and economic impacts.

gigino

weiland79 wrote: »

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

But why are they always painted blue or yellow?

Mine is purple with green spots. Still people complain about the turret on the top

On a serious note, of course it would make more environmental + economic sense to "cluster" houses together, and ideally to have say 8 main urban centres in the country

alchemist33

Interceptor wrote: »

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

Exactly. Just because the city folk feel comfortable cooped up in housing estates doesn't mean the rest of us have to. There should be some limits, but there's nothing wrong with the concept of one-off housing (or houses, as I like to call them).

gargleblaster

feelingstressed wrote:

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

No, the revisionist history is the attempt to make it seem as if it was not about slavery.

It was in fact about slavery.

mike65

That fella who wrote Bungalow Bliss has a lot to answer for. The handbook of 70s/80s middle class Ireland.

skywalker_208

Another living outside of Dublin bashing thread.... great.... :rolleyes:

Lets all pack up and live in match boxes in Dublin - it will solve all of our economic and environmental problems.

Or we could provide some investment for jobs OUTSIDE Dublin (shock horror) which would mean people from outside Dublin would not have to go near the place...

mike65 wrote: »

That fella who wrote Bungalow Bliss has a lot to answer for. The handbook of 70s/80s middle class Ireland.

Why is that then?
You could say the same for the Architects that are responsible for most of the disgusting poorly designed and poorly built apartment blocks and housing estates over the past 20 years....

Also - I dont see where this idea of everyone being able to easily get planning permission for "one off housing" came from. I found the process very long and very expensive and was handed several pages of conditions/restrictions when I finally got passed.

Mal-Adjusted

wow, how many threads can there be on this one topic?

Interceptor

Mal-Adjusted wrote: »

wow, how many threads can there be on this one topic?

Well we only have a finite number of monkeys and a limited number of typrewriters so I guess this is bound to happen from time to time...

'c