One-off housing

In remote areas provision of services to one-off houses using public utilities can be prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable and an alternative will need to be arranged

• Septic tank
• Cesspit
• Composting toilet

• Photovoltaics
• Wind turbine
• Micro hydro

• Mobile broadband
• 5G
• Satellite internet
• Satellite phone

• Rainwater harvesting
• Well

Government officials stated at a planning conference in 2001 that 36% of dwellings built in 2000 in Ireland were one-off houses.[1] Recent years have seen a huge increase in the supply of all types of housing in Ireland with 547,000 houses, equivalent to a third of the total national housing stock, built in the period 1996–2006[2]

There are two versions of this argument: that people should have the right to either build on land they own or else that people should have the right to build a house near to where their families live.

"Surely, if the culture of rural areas is to be preserved, then people from the countryside should not be routinely denied the opportunity to build a family home in their place of origin."

Éamon Ó Cuív[3]

Dr Séamus Caulfield, retired professor of archaeology at University College Dublin, has stated that Irish Stone Age rural settlements were dispersed throughout the countryside but that in recent years planners were using British Anglo-Saxon planning models that emphasise "settlement in urban areas – nucleation settlements".[4]

Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, has supported the view that one-off housing is a continuation of the traditional land use patterns in Ireland for millennia.

"We have a dispersed pattern of settlement going back thousands of years."[5]

In contrast, An Tasice has argued[6] that early settlements were nucleated and communal, often surrounded by ringforts for protection. It also argues that the environmental effects of one-off housing in the Stone Age were different from those observed in a car-dependent modern lifestyle.

It is argued by Dick Roche that

"The most important ingredient in rural development is population." [5]

The implication of this argument is that permitting one-off housing sustains rural populations by making it economically feasible for people to live in rural areas.

There are two counter-arguments: that one-off housing draws people out of rural towns and villages, stifling the growth of these regions,[7] or else that population growth is not desirable in 'ultra-rural' areas that ought rather to become natural recreational areas with land-owners employed in land-maintenance, forestry and tourism-related services.[8]

Opponents of one-off housing sometimes claim the motivation for this type of development is financial. Their argument is that due to the presumed Irish property bubble, it has become far cheaper to build rather than buy a house in Ireland and that one-off housing regulations allow for the conversion of inexpensive agricultural land into plots often worth more than €150,000 per site. They argue that farmers have become reliant on housing as a cash crop,[9] while one-off builders are motivated by the capital gains they expect to make on their property.

By contrast, advocates of one-off housing may characterise those who would limit this type of development as Dublin 4 urbanites[10] motivated by a desire to maintain the hegemony of cities and put country people in their place.[3] Opponents of one-off housing are sometimes compared to colonial British landlords from the era before Irish independence.

"There could have been 40 houses on one road in my area – and, of course, the British landlords evicted them. Now unfortunate people are trying to get planning permission in those areas today but there is a new British landlord, An Taisce, objecting to them. "

Johnny Brady TD, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Agriculture and Food[10]