A Sinn Féin TD has claimed that many local authorities are a “law unto themselves” when it comes to planning policy and applications for rural housing.
Roscommon-Galway TD, Claire Kerrane was speaking on the latest instalment of the On the Record series on Agriland.
She said she constantly meets people from rural areas that encounter difficulty in securing planning permission to build on family land or build locally.
“If we want to sustain our rural communities, then we need to allow people to build their house, typically where they grew up,” Deputy Kerrane said.
“We don’t have a big issue in rural communities where you have people coming down from Dublin or from Timbooktoo to buy a house, or build a house in the middle of nowhere. That doesn’t happen.
“You typically have people who grew up in a rural area. My house is down the road here. I hope to build and live close to home because I would live nowhere else in the world and lots of young people who grew up in rural Ireland feel like that,” she added.
Planning guidelines
Deputy Kerrane outlined that new planning guidelines for rural housing are due to be published but are long overdue at this point.
“I think at this point, they are two years overdue. We need that, but we need to get it right,” Sinn Féin’s spokesperson for agriculture stated.
“Local authorities are really being a law unto themselves. The rules are different in various parts of the country and in other parts of the country, it’s even more difficult than in other parts, to get that planning permission.
“But, if we want to have people living in rural communities, then we have to allow them to live here, to set up their homes, have a family if that’s what they choose, to work and then we have to make sure that the resources are put into those communities,” she added.
Deputy Kerrane said that improvements in broadband for rural areas have made a difference, but that more needs to be done.
“Agriculture and rural living goes hand in hand; if the farmer is doing well, the rural community is doing well,” she said.
Deputy Kerrane said this further necessitates a commission on the future of family farms, which her party has called for in the past.
“We need to look at how we sustain the family farm to make viable and to build our rural communities around that,” she said.