Ever since the collapse of the Celtic-tiger in 2008, almost every aspect of political, economic, social and environmental governance in Ireland has come in for some degree or critical retrospection. This critique has largely taken two forms i.e. to what extent did our governance contribute to the circumstances we now find ourselves in; and how can it be reformed to get us out of them? For reasons which will need little explaining to regular readers of this blog, planning governance has quite correctly been fingered as a major cause of our current problems and since 2010, on paper at least, has been the subject of significant reform efforts.
One issue, however, which has clearly evaded any form of genuine rational analysis, has been rural settlement policy. For decades, this political hot-potato has been gingerly fumbled by populist governments and manipulated as local political currency. The 2005 Sustainable Rural Housing Guidelines, which were intended to bring some clarity to what exactly the policy is, are a near perfect illustration of ‘win-win-win’ policy fuzziness leading to highly incoherent implementation across the country. According to Census 2011, the stock of ‘one-off’ dwellings in the State currently stands at 433,564 (26.3% of the total housing stock) with 417,094 (96%) located outside towns or settlements. Remarkably, one-quarter (104,000) of these dwellings have been constructed within the past ten years and since 2001 councils across the country have collectively granted planning permission for 174,000 new dispersed dwellings. 52% of the total stock of vacant housing units are located in rural areas.
While the number of planning permissions for ‘one-off’ dwellings has fallen from the heights of over 23,000 per annum in 2004, in 2012, 60% of all planning permissions in the State were for single dispersed houses. This is despite the clear intention of national policy to direct new housing development into settlement centres. While it is true that this high proportion is as much to do about the collapse of the multi-unit development sector, the absolute numbers are, nonetheless, striking. Since 2010, 14,500 new ‘one-off’ dwellings have been granted planning permission as compared to 14,900 multi-unit houses and 11,100 apartments.
The divisive debate over who should be permitted to self-build in the countryside tends to take place in abstract purity, completely divorced from both the public and private economic, social and environmental costs. Dispersal is considered a completely normal and benign feature of the Irish cultural landscape and recourse to statistics and facts will typically fall on deaf ears. Several intrepid commentators have from time to time poked their head above the parapet to question the wisdom of the spatial patterns taking hold across the country only to be instantly shot down with an emotive barrage of ‘anti-rural’ polemic. While politically, this is certainly an issue best ignored in the customary Irish fashion, in official policy circles at least, the very serious cumulative problems and hidden costs presented by Ireland’s highly dispersed settlement patterns have long been acknowledged.
Now, without being directly attributed, this legacy is manifesting itself in contentious and costly disputes over such issues as the development of large wind energy and grid infrastructure projects; the closure of rural post offices, schools, pubs, hospitals and garda stations; rural cost of living, car dependency, lack of public transport and social isolation (and even drink driving laws); the challenge of an ageing society and the obesity crisis; climate change targets; septic tank charges; and deficient rural infrastructure, such as broadband and roads. These issues will no-doubt continue to become more acute as government pursues an austerity agenda in parallel with spatially blind productivist policies (e.g. National Renewable Energy Strategy, Grid 25, Food Harvest 2020). To date there has been no acknowledgement whatsoever that rural Ireland is a finite, congested and contested space where multiple sectoral policies are operating at cross-purposes and which simply cannot continue to accommodate the competing demands being placed upon it.
The dominant common-sense is that anyone who questions the wisdom of the unfettered right to build anywhere in rural Ireland is somehow ‘anti-rural’ and has a ‘pro-urban’ (i.e. Dublin) agenda. I would offer the counter-narrative that, far from maintaining local populations or providing an economic stimulus, it is in fact settlement dispersal which is a key driver of rural economic decline, out-migration, housing vacancy, isolation, higher costs for rural families and the under-provision of critical infrastructure, employment opportunities and public services, particularly in peripheral rural regions. Furthermore, the often phoney debate on this issue, reinforced by the popular media, assumes there are homogenous ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ spatial entities. I grew up and spend the most part of my life in a 1960’s ‘one-off’ bungalow. However, my parents, like great majority of my neighbours, are not rural. They instead would be more aptly classed as ‘rurban’, commuting long distances daily to work in urban centres. Data from Census 2011 is indicative of clear spatial trends towards acute counter-urbanisation and ex-urban sprawl where householders are electing to self-build in ‘rurban’ locations in search of larger family dwellings, higher quality affordable homes (unlike some of the disastrous build quality in urban locations), a rural environment and a perceived better quality of life close to kinship networks. Of the 417,094 ‘one-off’ dwellings located outside of designated settlements, 350,000 (84%) were located within 5 kilometres of a town. Just 1% of occupied ‘one-off’ houses did not fall within a 10 kilometres radius of any town in 2011, and the majority of these were built before 2001. These trends are tacitly supported by fiscal policies where ‘one off’ housing has always been an unspoken component of national housing policy and where the government has conveniently shirked its responsibilities in this area.
While the horse has largely bolted and our costly spatial legacy is now ‘locked-in’, I would argue that questioning settlement patterns of rural Ireland remains relevant and is entirely consistent with a ‘pro-rural’ agenda. The government’s decision to establish a Commission for Economic Development in Rural Areas (CEDRA) is explicit recognition that large parts of rural Ireland have been unequally affected by the recession. However, the diffuse spatial structure of rural areas and its impact on economic opportunity continues to be utterly ignored. If we are ever to have a possibility of providing a counter-balance to the accelerating dominance of Dublin, Cork and Galway and provide some basic level of spatial equity then the challenge for regional planning is to deliver workable and socially acceptable alternatives to the current failed model of ‘one-off’ dispersal.
Gavin Daly
October 26, 2013 at 11:09 am
Excellent posting.
October 26, 2013 at 11:33 am
Well said. “Rurban” is a good term. It is not a process of rurual regeneration but rather of ultra-low-density suburbanisation.
October 26, 2013 at 7:45 pm
Gavin, One of the most enjoyable. insightful and reasonable articles I have read on the topic..thanks.
October 29, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Rural Housing is in many respects a safety valve for the completely dysfunctional urban development market.
To some extent, I’d speculate that if we didn’t have rural housing, we’d have slums, or illegal settlements, which is the normal response to inefficient development systems.
The problem with this theory is that ‘Rurbanisation’ is a socio-economic division where the middle classes leave county towns to live in the countryside, leaving behind the poorer sections of society. I believe UCD planning school have done some research on this.
So it may come down to access to finance, which is available for those one-offs but not urban (I include towns for rural hinterlands) redevelopment. Government and policy could be very influential on this, if even a token effort of will-power was to be applied.
October 30, 2013 at 5:49 pm
All
Thanks for comments. Please see below which might help engender some debate
In defence of one-off
The Government should actively support rural housing because balanced regional growth is a necessity to ensure a sustainable future, writes Galway architect Patrick McCabe
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
Patrick McCabe
One swallow does not make a summer. Budget 2014 took a small step in revitalising the domestic market by providing an income tax credit of 13.5 per cent for homeowners carrying out home improvement expenditure between €5,000 and €35,000. The Government should, of course, have taken a seismic step if they really want to kick-start the construction sector, and reduced VAT from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent, if even for a two year period.
There is evidence of increased activity in the residential sector, particularly in Dublin and Galway. Vacant units are being taken up by demand (the perceived oversupply is not true) and house starts are beginning to increase, but could do with an incentive as outlined above. House completions in 2006 were approximately 90,000. What were we expecting, a Chinese invasion?
House completions in 2011 were a paltry 10,000. The sustainable level of of house completions to match population growth should be approx 30,000 per annum. Now is the time to plan to cater for the population projections, and avoid another property housing bubble.
The population of Galway today is 75,500 and is forecast to increase by 65 per cent to 125,000 by 2040. The national figures are also quite remarkable: the current population of Ireland of 4.58 million is forecast to increase by 932,000 people to 5.51 million by 2035, and by 1.965 million people to 6.56 million by 2060. All this begs the question: where and how do future generations wish to live?
There is already a significant shortage of accommodation in Dublin, with rents increasing and house prices on the move. Surprisingly, the market place appears to have rejected the model of high density planning and desperately wants three or four bed family homes. This mindset or failure by architects/developers to provide acceptable high density life cycle family living will only increase the pressure on suburban sprawl. Irish people have been described as reluctant urban dwellers and take refuge in the tried and trusted semi d model, with front and back gardens.
The projected increased population has a danger of becoming east coast and Dublin-centric, unless balanced regional growth can be stimulated. Ireland has no shortage of land to cater for this population explosion. It appears that future housing growth will, in the main, will be High Density Urban, Low Rise Suburban, or Dispersed Rural.
High Density Urban living comes with civic duties and responsibilities to make it work for society. Bitter recent experience of dysfunctional management of common areas, vandalism to shared facilities, such as playgrounds and courtyard spaces, have alienated the non transient and would-be family sector of urban dwellers. We don’t have the generational experience of city living like our European neighbours, although we all love the benefits of the urban buzz, albeit on an “a la carte basis”.
Herein lies the challenge for urban planners, developers, architects – to design and deliver best in class urban living units, which are sustainable, desirable, have generous private open space/balconies, adequate storage, and internal spaces that meet full life cycle needs. Galway Docklands and the expanded harbour area is just one of many locations where this could be achieved, locally, but only with the benefit of imaginative and inclusive planning.
Low rise suburban will always be the people’s choice, especially for family units, and brings with it the challenges of land usage, transport issues and creating a sense of place.
Rural options
Ireland has an established pattern of dispersed settlement going back over 10,000 years. The town land system is of Gaelic origin, pre dating the Norman invasion, and most have names of Irish Gaelic origin. The Constitution affirms the right to life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with our genius and traditions. The question of rural housing has been a thorny issue for many years, in terms of sustainability and quality of design. On the latter, innovative design should be a welcome addition to the rural countryside, if expertly and sensitively handled. Here qualified and registered architects have a major role to play. I believe that rural housing should be actively encouraged in Government policy to avoid the migration to urban centres and to allow country communities to thrive. Communities are defined by Townlands, not necessarily by streets and squares.
So how sustainable are rural houses?. New technologies and the possibility of on site or local power generation makes rural houses very sustainable and, in future, a net energy contributor, once the national grid has been upgraded. The island of Eigg in the Scottish Inner Hebrides has developed an electricity supply that is powered from renewable sources and is environmentally and economically sustainable. On a practical basis, the issues of concern regarding sustainability for one-off houses can be considered on an item by item basis. Most rural sites can be served by Group Water Schemes, bored wells or rainwater harvesting. Effluent must comply with EPA guidelines and modern day package plants are designed accordingly.
Our country has an extensive network of rural roads, which provide access to rural sites. Power can be generated by solar/photovoltaic and by wind turbines, which in due course can feed into the grid, and of course charge the electric car. Interestingly, ten per cent of cars now sold in Norway are electric. Houses designed to passive or near passive standard and using geothermal will require minimum heating without reliance on fossil fuels. Regarding communications, broadband is virtually everywhere with unlimited capacity in fibre or satellite options.
All of these factors give the element of choice, especially given the increasing popularity of remote working with the shift away from the nine to five centralised place of work.
Well designed rural houses can provide wonderful living environments to raise a family and ensure a very good quality of life.
The State should not dictate where and how we live. There is no one solution to our future housing needs. I believe the option of rural housing should be actively supported by Government and that balanced regional growth is a necessity to ensure a sustainable future.
Patrick McCabe is an architect in private practice and has a significant portfolio of completed residential projects.
November 4, 2013 at 6:52 pm
One off housing in this jurisdiction would be a major problem if this place was a defined political / economic unit but it is not – in that real political sense it no longer exists.
One needs to look at other perfect pre car little market towns & villages in depressed economic areas to find where the real problem resides.
Example :When the French state / banks reached their final nation state peak scale during and post WW1 geographic areas such as the Ariege became Beech forest wilderness when once there was extensive farming and mining activity.
These perfect little villages have now essentially zero domestic primary economic activity other then external money for tourist and ski activity which is why the wild wood grows around them.
As the European market state scales up places such as Ireland will not justify the injection of primary goods input.
Ireland will become the 22nd century Ariege of Europe – a decent place for trekking and mushroom picking if they can somehow solve the rhododendron problem but with little else.
PS – those 100 year old beech trees are now causing a little problem……you see beech trees start to fall down after 100 years or so as they are but a colonizing species – clogging up those perfect little bridges downstream…..its amazing how such vast banking failure / success singularities such as the Great war can have such long term effects on the ecology and landscape of a geographical area once shaped much more intensively by human activity then is now the case.
November 13, 2013 at 1:01 pm
“The current failed model of one-off house dispersal” The author doesn’t say what’s so ‘failed’ about it? Thousands of kids growing up in the countryside as opposed to growing up in badly built town and city estates that incubate social problems. That to me is far from failure. That is a victory.
November 13, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Hi Tadhg
As per my post, I was one of those children myself. However, hundreds of thousands more children grow up in town and city estates and have access to opportunity. There are a myriad of social problems also incubated in ‘rurban/rural’ Ireland. Urban areas do not have a monopoly on these!
The author says precisely what in his view is failed about it throughout the entire post, including:
“The dominant common-sense is that anyone who questions the wisdom of the unfettered right to build anywhere in rural Ireland is somehow ‘anti-rural’ and has a ‘pro-urban’ (i.e. Dublin) agenda. I would offer the counter-narrative that, far from maintaining local populations or providing an economic stimulus, it is in fact settlement dispersal which is a key driver of rural economic decline, out-migration, housing vacancy, isolation, higher costs for rural families and the under-provision of critical infrastructure, employment opportunities and public services, particularly in peripheral rural regions.”
There are a number of letters in the Irish Times from last year on my proposed solution under ‘Urban/Rural Divide Outdated’
I will also try an publish shortly the empirical research behind my conclusions
Gavin
November 14, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Hi Gavin,
I look forward to reading the empirical research. While I agree that urban Ireland doesn’t have a monopoly on social problems (I didn’t mean to give that impression), I know from my work that there are by any measure a much greater amount of social problems in urban areas.
The problem here is that we have proven ourselves nearly totally incapable of buildings and providing quality urban environments for families. (One effect of this that you alluded to is increased numbers of people wanting to live in rural areas.) We need to tackle that problem rather then tackling the effects of that problem.
Over the years I have read lots of coverage that implies rural housing is a negative thing but I have yet to see a convincing case of why one off rural housing is a problem.
I have first-hand experience through my upbringing and my work of why it is a good thing.
November 14, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Hi Tadhg
There are of course plenty of social problems in urban areas. I think you will agree tha they also have very significant positive aspects socially, culturally and, not least, economically. Besides, a key point of my blog post is that the two issues should not be considered separately. Much of the hollowing out of urban centres such as Dublin, Cork and Limerick, and the consequent social issues, was as a result of ‘middle class flight’ to suburbia and rurbia. One of the key social issues which I am interested in is the silent and invisible problem of rural isolation, depression and rural suicide, which has been described as an epidemic by numerous county coroners.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/ourview/rural-suicide-rates–loneliness-is-at-root-of-these-deaths-143418.html
I completely agree that many urban environments offer poor quality for families, particularly Celtic tiger developments. However, that is not an argument in favour of ‘one off’ dispersal. There is plenty of evidence as to why rural housing is a problem as outlined in my blog. The difficulty of course is that many of the problems are externalised to society at large and therefore typically go unrecognised. You may be interested in this research [particularly the economic issues]:
https://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/research/econ/strivereport44.html#.UoUxqxpFRUU
The conclusion that this report comes to is similar to my own views – self-build, serviced sites in small rural towns and villages.
http://www.lcc.ie/Planning/Serviced_Residential_Sites_in_Towns_and_Villages/
However, this would require some genuine planning, foresight and a commitment real rural plannning which has been sadly lacking to date.
Gavin
November 30, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Reblogged this on One-Off Ireland.
December 21, 2013 at 9:24 am
Hello Gavin,
I came across these postings a bit late in the day. I note, with some personal interest, that the term ‘rurbanisation’ is still placed in parenthesis. Back in 2003, I submitted a paper a first draft paper to the ISJ under the title ‘Ireland’s Rurban Horizon’ (published in revised form 2004). Some hsitory might be of interest to you and students of rural Ireland.
I took the concept from French rural sociologist Jacques Rémy whose work I studied in France. I attended a seminar run by him, sometime around 1997 that included a paper by the head of France’s rural research organization INRA, Bernard Wolfer. Mr. Wolfer declared that the rural was now outside the farming world. Given the CAP reform context back then I thought this insight of interest in the Irish context. I adopted the notion of Ireland’s rurban horizon as a metaphor to frame a pilot research context.
My research question was parsimonious: why was it that nobody seemed to SEE the effects of anarchic rurbanisation on their social and physical landscapes. (I was living in south Wexford at that time and the Celtic Tiger was beginning to roar there with the new N-11 motorway). Of course, more than a decade on the question may seem self-evident. It was certainly not so back in 2001-2 when I started to ask assistant planners, Teagasc officials and farmers who had become ‘one-off’ builders. I considered one-of housing is integral of our pastoral cultural and its principles of closed local solidarity, and to adopt Mary Douglas’s term, the silent ‘set of keep out signs’. Selling farmland building sites cannot be abstracted from the social life of the farm family it supported. The metaphorical reasoning behind the Ireland’s rurban horizon wthat the structures of that family were being changed fundamentally by the commodification of farmland values.
This post is to suggest that one of those keep-out signs is to found embedded in the practices of Ireland’s farming technocracy and its relations with other territorial/spatial percepts of planning. These percepts are dispositions or rooted in the pastoral habitus What has been so often missed in the rurbanisation debate is the way farmland and its uses is considered as a consumer good by those sanctioned to understand it in the greater context of a national resource.
As a sociologist, I thought then, and still do, that our job was to help bring empirical qualitative evidence to the other social science disciplines. By the way, having lived for the last six years in the Finistère, Brittany, the realities of rural housing and its peri-urban planning should be of interest to Irish students looking for a pertinent comparative study to undertake.
Many thanks and keep up the good work
Peter G Collier
December 21, 2013 at 9:25 am
I hit the post button by mistake so there a number of typo mistakes. I don’t seem to be able to get back in to edit so please forgive me.