Mr. Ciarán Tracey:

It is very easy to read our submission about radical revision of rural housing as being against rural housing. Rural housing is a very complex issue. There is a huge amount of data available which would enable an appropriate and bespoke policy to be developed for rural housing. I have worked for the last 14 years in the most rural local authority in the country in Leitrim. We have the lowest level of urbanisation in the country and there is a huge volume of rural housing in Leitrim as a total proportion of the housing in the county. During the upper Shannon pilot scheme, which most people would know as the urban renewal scheme, the level of house building in the countryside in County Leitrim dropped by 50% because through the urban renewal scheme there were opportunities for people to obtain housing in the towns and villages throughout the county. I can produce those statistics for the committee if it wants to see them. In fact, they are in a published paper I did for the institute during that period. They are a bit outdated but Deputy Casey is correct when he says the statistics are being influenced by the level of applications being made throughout the country.

In Leitrim, one-off housing made up 85% of all planning applications because there was nothing else happening. It skews the statistics and makes one think of the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics" but there are very solid statistics there which show there is a high degree of one-off rural housing happening in areas where they are actually not doing anything for rural renewal because they are happening in the immediate hinterlands of larger towns and villages where there is already existing pressure for services such as school places. If one takes a place like Ballyreilly West in County Leitrim, which has a two-teacher school, we cannot get anybody to build a house there. The policy in Leitrim is that anybody who wants to build a house out in Ballyreilly is more than welcome to build one because the placement of a new house there would be a significant investment in that community. The pressure is not coming from people who are native to the area looking to build in their own area but from urban generated housing. We have failed the community by not providing adequate choice in housing, whether in a town or a village. I live in a village 7 km outside Carrick-on-Shannon and it is a vibrant village. In terms of demand for school places, since I moved into that village the school has gone from a four-classroom school to an eight-classroom school. We have four pubs, a hotel, and a community. All of these were built because that village is vibrant. It has a vibrant rural hinterland with lots of people who are living in the countryside around it using the services. I can go to other villages elsewhere in the county that have nothing like that.

We need to radically revise national policy because sometimes the policy document is quoted to justify housing in inappropriate locations. It is like the devil quoting the Bible - one picks out the section of the sustainable rural housing guidelines that supports granting the planning permission in that particular location. We are not calling for the ban on rural housing because that is ridiculous. The rural population needs to be sustained. We need to do things to try to discontinue the depopulation of the rural areas. We have to make those areas that are suffering from population loss attractive to people to come into. That can only be done through appropriate location and convenience to jobs, etc. It can also be done by ensuring they do not go into those areas already suffering from urban generated demands in the hinterlands of the towns. There should be a policy that sets out a modus operandiwhere the local authority will identify, for example, electoral districts that have a population decline, those which have the highest levels of vacancy and those with the highest level of uncompleted estates, using data that is there like that. The policy should identify perhaps two or three categories of rural areas, some where anybody who wants to live in a rural area can go to live and others which are more restrictive, perhaps retaining what little capacity is still in those rural areas in the hinterland of the towns and urban centres to accommodate the progeny of the original residents in that area.

Many rural farmers cannot provide a house for their son or daughter on their land, which is in close proximity to the town, because the capacity has been absorbed by people who have moved into the area. We must have bespoke policies and in that sense we are talking about a radical revision. We have to set out a radical and detailed methodology by which we designate areas that are open for consideration, areas that have an open book approach, areas that have a limited approach and areas that we have to close down. That is the approach.

There have definitely been difficulties in recent years particularly since the water table and soakage tests have come in. It is now very difficult to find a site that is suitable to take a waste water treatment system. There are people, such as those in Trinity College, looking to devise non-discharge systems. They are very expensive and will really only accommodate people who have to live in these areas and who will have to go to extra cost because of environmental protection regulations if they are to do it.

I agree that some of the statistics have been skewed by recent activities but the underlying point has been made in our submission that at the moment there is not enough being done to provide housing choices in towns and villages and urban centres and that is forcing people to vote with their feet and look for a one-off house. It is an easy option. In the longer run, they are paying for those options. People who really do not need to be out there are paying for it with their pocket book. We are also paying for it with our competitiveness as a nation.

When people are living 20 km to 30 km away from their jobs, and one spouse is travelling 30 km in one direction and the other is going in the opposite direction to her job, they need two cars and their salaries have to be commensurate. It puts up the cost of living of those living in these isolated location, which in a sense they have been driven to, not necessarily because they are sons and daughters of existing landowners who want to be near home and in the area they grew up in. I support people like that because they become members of the church choir and join the GAA and actually know where the local school is. To them something that is convenient is across a field, rather than a two mile round trip on the road. We have to support the existing rural population to maintain themselves and to grow, but that will not necessarily mean a liberal housing programme. It needs the delivery of jobs on the ground, convenient to those people.