One-off housing? We call it our community
HOW selfish I am. There I was the other morning tending my plants – some of them foreign plants – in my two-thirds of an acre of garden, in absolute ignorance of how selfish I was being. I was set straight by John Moran, a former secretary general of the Department of Finance, who is forever dreaming up ways for other people to be more unselfish.
Moran was at the MacGill Summer School in Donegal – he flew in – to give an address that was either very incoherent or very badly reported (I sincerely don’t know which).
But the gist of it was a complaint about one-off rural housing and the wilful selfregarding individualism of those people who make their homes in the countryside instead of in town. Yes, that again.
Mine is a one-off rural house, albeit one that was built some time before the Famine. They were all one-off houses in those days, you see.
Indeed, a glance at a first-edition Ordnance Survey map suggests that ribbon development was not frowned on at all in 19th-century Ireland. But John Moran is all agin it, for reasons that I’ve taken some trouble to penetrate.
Reason one is a rather odd one, if I’m interpreting it correctly. It seems to be that it would be more wholesome for other people – presumably not Moran himself – to live in closer quarters.
‘What is it in our Irish psyche that makes us want to live in a detached house on three-quarters of an acre, with cut grass… and probably foreign plants growing in our walled-off garden?’ he wonders.
Moran himself reportedly keeps one home in Dublin and another in his native Limerick, as well as a summer home in the south of France. But wouldn’t it be super if the plebs embraced higher housing density?
Another reason is that people are getting something for nothing. ‘We should not allow those that built a house in a field beside their parents to necessarily give that right to their kids, depriving our country of agricultural land which is valuable, and indeed, giving something that is not available to anybody else.’
The whole countryside briefly rang with laughter at that – the idea that agricultural land is valuable – and then went back to weeding around the crocosmia. In fact, about the only practical value to be got from owning a farm is keeping your family around you in your dotage by giving them sites. A third reason is the cost of services such as water, electricity, public transport etc. In fact, we pay to join the grid, pay to join the group water scheme and, come on, don’t be daft, there’s no public transport. ‘We have to stop rewarding those who want to live selfishly,’ says Moran. Reward? What reward? And the final reason is it doesn’t look all that nice. As Moran’s plane flew in over Donegal, this vocal champion of public transport could see how that beautiful county was ‘being destroyed by individual one-off housing’. Put simply, urban day-trippers in Range Rovers would enjoy the countryside more if there were no one in it. Well, no one but a few apple-cheeked farmers and their John Hindepostcard children. Oh and people working in tourism, because day-trippers in Range Rovers never like to be too far from a dish of chowder and an interpretive centre.
The thing is, farmers and tourism people need electricity and water too. They need schools and churches and pints of milk and the promise, at least, of emergency services, even though the wake tends to be half-over before an ambulance arrives. Where there are people, there is a call for services. It’s not unreasonable. You can’t empty the countryside altogether.
Besides, what some highminded city-dwellers call one-off housing, we in rural Ireland call a community. That is the long and short of it. And yes. there are ugly houses, and yes there’s a proliferation of empty holiday homes. Local authority planners are answerable for that. In fact, someone should question them about it – someone like a former €200,000-a-year civil servant with time on his hands, for instance. Me, I have two-thirds of an acre to attend to.