Bungalow politics

Victor

Tell me whats stopping we wasting a couple of county councillors?

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http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2002/0220/3805387886DIFEB20.html

An Irishman's Diary
By Kevin Myers

An Taisce is a faceless body trying to bury rural Ireland, they were declaring heatedly in Mayo County Council last week. Cllr Al O'Donnell of Fianna Fáil said: "They want to see empty, barren hillsides with no lights after 5 p.m. An Taisce is playing their part in that. They will oppose vehemently the construction of one hermit in the countryside."

We will leave aside the issue of that modest thing a hermit, and move on to what Cllr O'Donnell apparently sees as a true horror story: empty, barren hillsides with no lights after 5 p.m. In most places across Europe, and where I live in Kildare, that is called the countryside, and the unadorned countryside and its darkness are not seen as some appalling horrors to be banished by conspicuous signs of habitation, but something to be revered - and, moreover, protected and preserved from uncontrolled development.

Illuminated bungalows

Yet much of Ireland these days - and not just Mayo, mind - thinks the countryside, the real countryside, should be abolished - by large, illuminated bungalows, with grotesque Spanish arches, concrete balustrades, and dormer windows.

So, far from Cllr O'Donnell being a minority voice on Mayo County Council, he speaks for the overwhelming majority. The council voted unanimously to "delist" An Taisce as a body to be notified over implementation of, or departures from, the County Development Plan. "It is time we saw these faceless people," said Peter Sweeney, Fianna Fáil. "We know they want to totally abolish development in rural Ireland so they can come down at weekends here to do their fishing and shooting."

Fine Gael councillors were as vocal. "We already have restrictions on planning because of Special Areas of Conservation and National Heritage Areas," said Gerry Coyle. "We have people in Brussels telling us we cannot graze cattle on our own lands. There will be flora and fauna and everything else, but there will be no people." The Labour Party's Johnny Mee had his say also: "If this doesn't stop, the county will be denuded."

Clearly, these councillors don't read the Co Mayo website, which reports that, far from Mayo's population being denuded, it is steadily rising for the first time in over a century. Yet how those special areas of conservation and national heritage must infuriate Mayo councillors when they could be more properly redeveloped as sites for the building of huge bungalows full of windowless corridors, unused en-suite bathrooms and vast panorama windows.

Worse still: consider the brooding and forbidding darkness of Nephin and Croagh Patrick, and consider how Mayo councillors gnash their teeth in frustration that they can't allow planning permissions that would festoon the sides of those mountains with hundreds of such concrete dwellings.

Nightfall in Mayo: no darkness, no unlit place for curlew, hare, snipe, badger or hedgehog; instead, just an endless panorama of huge Californian-type homes, in the mud and in the rain, on every hillside and every mountain slope, all across north-west Connacht.

Dependency culture

Such excrescences are inevitable when cash has been distributed from the central exchequer and from Brussels for decades. In such a diseased dependency culture, grants become rights, as axiomatic and as indisputable as air; but naturally, receipt of those grants confers no sense of responsibility, no evidence that some stewardship of ancient birthrights might also be expected in return. The land that allows such grants is locally seen to be of use immediately, without regard to the future, without concern for a broader responsibility, without acknowledgement of the brevity of all our tenure on what we have and hold.

This current generation is the first in Ireland's history to experience almost universal prosperity; yet what did it do amid all its riches, but campaign vigorously to bring man-made ruination to wherever the hand of man had barely touched before?

So, drain the bogs; clear the woods; canalise the river banks; give planning permissions for houses on every promontory, through every glen, along every coastal road, over every headland.

An Taisce can't escape responsibility for this planning farrago. It still reeks of a culture of neo-Georgian feyness, cut-glass accents and mwa-mwa kisses into cheekside thin air: all of which is just about as welcome in rural Ireland as night classes in communist land management.

Small farmers

An Taisce - of course - made absolutely no impact on the overwhelmingly economic perceptions of Irish farmers, who simply do not see that without the vast capital transfers from Germany, most of them would have become extinct. And just about the first to have vanished would have been the small farmers of Mayo, who have been able to eke out an existence, coaxing thin milk and frugal meat out of the acid boglands and rocky pastures there, only because of the huge financial assistance from West Rhine-Westphalia.

That assistance, of course, was welcome to those farmers; but what was not welcome was the implementation of the laws of a civil society which made that assistance possible, and which - furthermore - declares that rules that make sense in Foxrock do not necessarily make sense in Mayo. (There are no milk quotas in Foxrock.) And just as birth in Foxrock doesn't entitle you to live there for ever, so it is with the countryside; or very soon there will be merely hundreds of thousands of houses on one-acre plots, unsustainable in terms of sewerage, water, electricity, telephones, schools, roads or transport.

In other words, no countryside, no wild acres, just extended suburbia; and maybe, such visual sleaze is what the councillors of Mayo really want.

mike65

As ever Myers is bang on target, Bungalow Blitz is truly
a scourge on the Irish landscape, whole chunks of Co. Wicklow
have dissapeared beneath the onslaught of Mr & Mrs Dublin.

It simply should'nt be possible to build an single house on an ad-hoc basis. All buildings should be grouped a la the crossroads village, this way you get some community, a critical mass and
therefore the potential for proper infrastructure such as
sewage and water supply schemes. The septic tank solution is a mini health and evoironmental disaster.

Trouble is planning is a deeply political business here which is why things are as they are.

Mike.