Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland

Chapter 10 - Landscape and Rural Housing

We moved west, out of Dublin, in 1999. The house we bought had been built as a holiday home for letting. When we arrived here there were eighteen other dwellings within a kilometre of our house, now there are twentyeight . Most of the new dwellings are dormer bungalows sitting on half-acre and one-acre sites. This had been an area with an aging population but now there is a good mix of families, many with young children. There are also several houses that are vacant or empty most of the time. Some 20 kilometres to the west, along the Atlantic coast, the pace of change was more dramatic. LANDSCAPE AND RURAL HOUSING Chapter 10 170 Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland LANDSCAPE AND RURAL HOUSING 171 In 2001, at the height of the Celtic Tiger, resident and writer Nuala O’Faolain wrote with resignation of the passing of an old landscape order. There are tattered bits of planning application notices stuck to plywood boards in every second field in rural Ireland. Several of them are nailed to poles along the lane that I look on as home myself. I couldn’t have hoped that my corner would be left untouched. When I heard a bulldozer on Christmas Eve I tried to think positively – to be grateful for the nearly nine years I’ve had during which only two new homes went up and only one of those slap-bang in front of me. I said to myself that other people deserve the benefit of this place as much as I do. I said everything positive I could think of to myself. But I lament, and it is not just personal. I’m watching the transformation of one Irish townland from an ancient agricultural settlement into a middle-class suburb.1 The scale of modern rural housing development is frequently downplayed. Conor Skehan has referred to unnecessary ‘fretting and fussing’ over the issue2 and supporters of dispersed development often assert that the numbers of houses are over-estimated and that ‘far more development is going on in the villages, towns and cities than in the country’.3 The scale of what is happening, in the absence of reliable statistics, has been open to challenge until recently.4 Fig. 10.1. The Clare coastline at Liscannor in 2011. Most geographers and planners would include villages and towns as part of the settlement fabric of a rural area. However, in Ireland a house is usually only regarded as genuinely rural if it is sited in the open countryside. Even conceding this narrow definition, there were almost 400,000 such rural houses in the Republic at the time of the 2006 census, the census defining ‘one-off houses’ as ‘detached houses in rural areas with an individual septic tank or other individual sewerage treatment system’. There are now an estimated 450,000, which is about a third of the country’s housing stock and about three times the number that existed in 1971.5 According to Roy Foster ‘there has been, since 1973, the most far-reaching revolution in the Irish countryside since that created by the Land Acts between 1881 and 1909’.6 The Northern Ireland situation is not dissimilar, where as many one-offs are being built every year as are being built in the whole of the remainder of the United Kingdom.7 In the last two years, about half the houses built in the Republic have been one-offs, built by and for individual homeowners on rural plots. Admittedly this is a short-term phenomenon at national level, reflecting the collapse of the house construction industry in the wake of the property crash. However, in many parts of the country this has been the prevailing pattern for a decade or more. Over the period 2001 to 2011, one-off houses accounted for more than 50 per cent of all dwellings granted planning permission by councils in Kerry, North Tipperary, Galway and Mayo.8 Fig. 10.2. Moore Road, 8 kilometres from Dungannon in County Tyrone, an example of suburbanised countryside, photographed in 2009. 170 Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland LANDSCAPE AND RURAL HOUSING 171 In 2001, at the height of the Celtic Tiger, resident and writer Nuala O’Faolain wrote with resignation of the passing of an old landscape order. There are tattered bits of planning application notices stuck to plywood boards in every second field...