Tomorrow: “why isn’t there better public transport and services in rural areas?!”
>“It’s unacceptable that you can have people get planning permission for holiday homes in certain parts of the country, and young people who were born in those areas are struggling to get planning permission,” he said.
These are not the same parts of the country.
I’ve no problem with this but they need to pay full costs for services which are hugely subsidized at the moment.
Surely it should just be children should be able to build houses in their local area.
The auld farmer complex. They can do what they want, drive how they want, cheat the system, etc….
Just join the queue like the rest of us.
While no-one can reasonably disagree with the headline the problem has come about as the vast majority of farmers kids who do not work locally would get planning permission, build a house and then rent it out and sell once the 10 year period was over (some restriction applied like that in certain areas).
Everyone local would know they have no intention of living in the place when they applied for planning permission but no one ‘could’ object.
This being done to death has shot themselves in the foot. It wasn’t blow ins buying a site and getting planning that saw holiday homes take over certain rural hotspots, it was local people trying to make a quick buck building on a ‘free’ site and eventually selling. They’ve shafted their own younger generations.
We’re in a housing crisis and there needs to be less restriction put on the building of houses. He’s completly right. Too long the government and local councils are intentionally constraining the supply of housing to keep rent up and keep them all in a job with their endless red tape
Lots of Dublin commenters already with the same points that don’t understand the current situation in many villages.
One off housing is the only thing being built now – getting through under local needs. There is no other development at scale in villages despite said villages, not even in tourist hotspots, having 100% occupancy.
Councils need to put the chicken before the egg for the costs, subsidies arguments – build capacity in water, sewer and electricity. And build roads and sell sites individually. Developers are not doing anything out here.
He wants people to live in rural areas,but not villages. I don’t understand his anti village sentiment.
Personally think farmers can fuck off. Massive swathes of inherited land and special treatment on top of it while everyone else is left to pay foolish rents in shitty apartments.
They do. Usually hideous Mac Mansions at that.
An unintended consequence of one off rural housing is the amount of objections and judicial reviews it creates for any other new building. Ireland has one of the lowest population densities of any Western European country, but there are very few sites to place, say, wind turbines that aren’t very close to someone’s house.
If you think of each house as an exclusion zone around which you find it difficult to place infrastructure or development, the amount of viable land to develop is pretty slim.
I think we have a uniquely noxious relationship in Ireland between farmers and society at large which, granted, farmers often don’t help by being entitled arseholes. However, there seems to be a big disconnect where society sees farmers as well-to-do landowners constantly asking for special provision. In reality most farmers, while asset rich, are under extreme pressure in terms of cashflow because the price of most of our products stays the same or drops relative to inflation while every single one of our inputs is exploding. Dairy is pretty much the only type of farming that reliably makes a full-time liveable wage for a family farm. Every other farmer you see, unless they’re farming at industrial scale, is farming part time and fighting to break even while paying the bills with at least one other job. And, frankly, it’s hard, dirty, dangerous and antisocial work. The so-what is that farming is a less attractive prospect than ever before and becoming more so. It’s not difficult to incentivise young farmers to stay on the land, but making it somewhat straightforward to build a home where you’ll be farming is an easy and obvious one. The alternative is that, in a generation’s time, we become significantly more dependent on imported food, with all of the economic, environmental and food security concerns that that implies. You can take the position that farmers can go fuck themselves and you’d rather get all of your beef from Argentina than let them get one up on you in housing if you’d like, that’s your right, but it’s just important to understand exactly what the tradeoff of that position is.
If land was zoned and sites available around small villages to build, would people build there instead? I was raised in a one off build along a country lane and it wasn’t great not being able to get anywhere until you could drive essentially, and the parents just end up as taxi drivers. Would people be happy to live in a village instead? (Hypothetical I know)
Was driving around the UK (Yorkshire) recently and it’s noticeable in rural areas how the only houses you see are farm houses next to a yard, or repurposed former farm buildings, and then the villages. There is no concept of the one off new build from the past 40 years that we have here.
A complex issue with many different scenarios really.
Recently started moving ahead with a one-off house myself on family land, modest, and not necessarily our first choice option, but incredibly fortunate and lucky given the circumstances, realistically and financially speaking it became by far the most plausible option for our family, not out of the way, in line with the numerous other one-offs nearby, and overall just tried to make the planners jobs as simple as possible.
Have rented for a decade plus, both here and abroad, both houses and apartments, with and without transport options nearby, and in an ideal world I would still be getting the train to work every day, but it became unfeasible for various reasons over time, be it rent costs, landlords selling, or an endless mould epidemic, no matter how much the dehumidifier was ran.
Been saving regimentally for a good while now but the housing market was and still is unforgiving and competitive, it looked like we would never get there, but privileged to get family land, which is somehow closer to my current workplace and much more affordable build wise than housing in the area.
Not really a for or against one-off housing argument I suppose, I understand the difficulties and impracticalities of it, just the insight of one individual who’s experienced both sides of the coin and just trying to support a family at the end of the day.
I agree. Allowing folks to live in the communities they grew up in should be an option for people.
There are things we can do to make rural housing more sustainable. Things beyond just saying “no.”
Only if you can zone a few sites clustered together to make a new hamlet or village in the area. Rural houses are too spread out making it very difficult to provide services.
Our commitment to ribbon development will be the death of us
I work on my family’s farm and respectfully I absolutely don’t agree with the headline. Every side road in the country are now what I call rural streets, detached houses built next to each other. It is worse than a sprawling suburb. Our towns and cities have to grow and they can’t keep growing outwards, they have to grow to handle our growing population. Urbanisation is what has happen to handle population growth and actually deliver workable public services.
Also urban areas are pushing public transport (they need to) if lots of people have to drive into their local towns because they have little choice in the matter it kinda undermines the whole approach.
The problem is that the existing residents in urban areas don’t want to change their areas and there has not been enough houses built each year for over a decade. And land owners want to do something for their kids.
Well, if they are going to farm, absolutely. We do no-where near enough to keep farming going as a desirable profession and its absolutely essential for us obviously. But if they just want their big mansion down the field while they carry on a solicitors practice in Dublin…maybe not.
We talk about sustainability, but it can’t trump the longstanding tradition of living rurally. The approach has to be “how can this be made work”. Electrification of heating, high home energy standards can go a way to helping (one of the biggest unspoken rural issues is air quality – solid fuel smog sitting in calm air). Pushing EV scrappage incentives anywhere someone lives more than 1KM or an unwalkable road from public trasport access would be another. These people are never going to be served adequately by last mile rural local links, and it wouldn’t be practical anyway.
Other than those points, build away. Same with a city. You own land, you want to put a dwelling on it, and it meets certain efficiency standards? Build away. The alternative is the absolute degradation of our society due to the housing crisis.
If they own the land i dont see why not!
“local area” is your hinterland.
Preferably your nearest village or town.
I have literally zero sympathy for people who want to live in the middle of nowhere but also expect all modern services. connection to water, sewage, internet, roads and so on.
I guarantee these same people will complain about the lack of transport in rural Ireland whilst purposefully seeking to build housing as far away as possible from everyone else.
Local needs was ruled illegal and discriminatory by the EU (it’s a de facto “Irish only” building ban) but nothing happened as far as I’m aware.
25 comments
I’m a non-farmer and he’s right.
Tomorrow: “why isn’t there better public transport and services in rural areas?!”
>“It’s unacceptable that you can have people get planning permission for holiday homes in certain parts of the country, and young people who were born in those areas are struggling to get planning permission,” he said.
These are not the same parts of the country.
I’ve no problem with this but they need to pay full costs for services which are hugely subsidized at the moment.
Surely it should just be children should be able to build houses in their local area.
The auld farmer complex. They can do what they want, drive how they want, cheat the system, etc….
Just join the queue like the rest of us.
While no-one can reasonably disagree with the headline the problem has come about as the vast majority of farmers kids who do not work locally would get planning permission, build a house and then rent it out and sell once the 10 year period was over (some restriction applied like that in certain areas).
Everyone local would know they have no intention of living in the place when they applied for planning permission but no one ‘could’ object.
This being done to death has shot themselves in the foot. It wasn’t blow ins buying a site and getting planning that saw holiday homes take over certain rural hotspots, it was local people trying to make a quick buck building on a ‘free’ site and eventually selling. They’ve shafted their own younger generations.
We’re in a housing crisis and there needs to be less restriction put on the building of houses. He’s completly right. Too long the government and local councils are intentionally constraining the supply of housing to keep rent up and keep them all in a job with their endless red tape
Lots of Dublin commenters already with the same points that don’t understand the current situation in many villages.
One off housing is the only thing being built now – getting through under local needs. There is no other development at scale in villages despite said villages, not even in tourist hotspots, having 100% occupancy.
Councils need to put the chicken before the egg for the costs, subsidies arguments – build capacity in water, sewer and electricity. And build roads and sell sites individually. Developers are not doing anything out here.
He wants people to live in rural areas,but not villages. I don’t understand his anti village sentiment.
Personally think farmers can fuck off. Massive swathes of inherited land and special treatment on top of it while everyone else is left to pay foolish rents in shitty apartments.
They do. Usually hideous Mac Mansions at that.
An unintended consequence of one off rural housing is the amount of objections and judicial reviews it creates for any other new building. Ireland has one of the lowest population densities of any Western European country, but there are very few sites to place, say, wind turbines that aren’t very close to someone’s house.
If you think of each house as an exclusion zone around which you find it difficult to place infrastructure or development, the amount of viable land to develop is pretty slim.
I think we have a uniquely noxious relationship in Ireland between farmers and society at large which, granted, farmers often don’t help by being entitled arseholes. However, there seems to be a big disconnect where society sees farmers as well-to-do landowners constantly asking for special provision. In reality most farmers, while asset rich, are under extreme pressure in terms of cashflow because the price of most of our products stays the same or drops relative to inflation while every single one of our inputs is exploding. Dairy is pretty much the only type of farming that reliably makes a full-time liveable wage for a family farm. Every other farmer you see, unless they’re farming at industrial scale, is farming part time and fighting to break even while paying the bills with at least one other job. And, frankly, it’s hard, dirty, dangerous and antisocial work. The so-what is that farming is a less attractive prospect than ever before and becoming more so. It’s not difficult to incentivise young farmers to stay on the land, but making it somewhat straightforward to build a home where you’ll be farming is an easy and obvious one. The alternative is that, in a generation’s time, we become significantly more dependent on imported food, with all of the economic, environmental and food security concerns that that implies. You can take the position that farmers can go fuck themselves and you’d rather get all of your beef from Argentina than let them get one up on you in housing if you’d like, that’s your right, but it’s just important to understand exactly what the tradeoff of that position is.
If land was zoned and sites available around small villages to build, would people build there instead? I was raised in a one off build along a country lane and it wasn’t great not being able to get anywhere until you could drive essentially, and the parents just end up as taxi drivers. Would people be happy to live in a village instead? (Hypothetical I know)
Was driving around the UK (Yorkshire) recently and it’s noticeable in rural areas how the only houses you see are farm houses next to a yard, or repurposed former farm buildings, and then the villages. There is no concept of the one off new build from the past 40 years that we have here.
A complex issue with many different scenarios really.
Recently started moving ahead with a one-off house myself on family land, modest, and not necessarily our first choice option, but incredibly fortunate and lucky given the circumstances, realistically and financially speaking it became by far the most plausible option for our family, not out of the way, in line with the numerous other one-offs nearby, and overall just tried to make the planners jobs as simple as possible.
Have rented for a decade plus, both here and abroad, both houses and apartments, with and without transport options nearby, and in an ideal world I would still be getting the train to work every day, but it became unfeasible for various reasons over time, be it rent costs, landlords selling, or an endless mould epidemic, no matter how much the dehumidifier was ran.
Been saving regimentally for a good while now but the housing market was and still is unforgiving and competitive, it looked like we would never get there, but privileged to get family land, which is somehow closer to my current workplace and much more affordable build wise than housing in the area.
Not really a for or against one-off housing argument I suppose, I understand the difficulties and impracticalities of it, just the insight of one individual who’s experienced both sides of the coin and just trying to support a family at the end of the day.
I agree. Allowing folks to live in the communities they grew up in should be an option for people.
There are things we can do to make rural housing more sustainable. Things beyond just saying “no.”
Only if you can zone a few sites clustered together to make a new hamlet or village in the area. Rural houses are too spread out making it very difficult to provide services.
Our commitment to ribbon development will be the death of us
I work on my family’s farm and respectfully I absolutely don’t agree with the headline. Every side road in the country are now what I call rural streets, detached houses built next to each other. It is worse than a sprawling suburb. Our towns and cities have to grow and they can’t keep growing outwards, they have to grow to handle our growing population. Urbanisation is what has happen to handle population growth and actually deliver workable public services.
Also urban areas are pushing public transport (they need to) if lots of people have to drive into their local towns because they have little choice in the matter it kinda undermines the whole approach.
The problem is that the existing residents in urban areas don’t want to change their areas and there has not been enough houses built each year for over a decade. And land owners want to do something for their kids.
Well, if they are going to farm, absolutely. We do no-where near enough to keep farming going as a desirable profession and its absolutely essential for us obviously. But if they just want their big mansion down the field while they carry on a solicitors practice in Dublin…maybe not.
We talk about sustainability, but it can’t trump the longstanding tradition of living rurally. The approach has to be “how can this be made work”. Electrification of heating, high home energy standards can go a way to helping (one of the biggest unspoken rural issues is air quality – solid fuel smog sitting in calm air). Pushing EV scrappage incentives anywhere someone lives more than 1KM or an unwalkable road from public trasport access would be another. These people are never going to be served adequately by last mile rural local links, and it wouldn’t be practical anyway.
Other than those points, build away. Same with a city. You own land, you want to put a dwelling on it, and it meets certain efficiency standards? Build away. The alternative is the absolute degradation of our society due to the housing crisis.
If they own the land i dont see why not!
“local area” is your hinterland.
Preferably your nearest village or town.
I have literally zero sympathy for people who want to live in the middle of nowhere but also expect all modern services. connection to water, sewage, internet, roads and so on.
I guarantee these same people will complain about the lack of transport in rural Ireland whilst purposefully seeking to build housing as far away as possible from everyone else.
Local needs was ruled illegal and discriminatory by the EU (it’s a de facto “Irish only” building ban) but nothing happened as far as I’m aware.
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