Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A huge bugbear in County Clare is that TII, in conjunction with the office of the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, has written to Clare County Council, as I understand it, saying national roads in the country can no longer be considered for planning permission purposes. Another Deputy raised this matter earlier. Generally, that makes sense. If there is a fast road or main thoroughfare linking major towns and cities, in theory there should not be building on it; however, that is not the way settlement patterns have happened in Ireland. West of Ennis, there are only a small handful of significant villages and Kilrush is the only town of real significance in west Clare. All along the road people have purchased land with small access roads. Overnight they found out they cannot build there any more. To compound that, the national planning framework, which is not in TII's remit, specifies that some of these villages can only grow by a handful of houses in the next five years. The cumulative effect of these two letters landing on the desk of Clare County Council is basically that in west Clare nothing can be built outside of the towns. It is devastating. If someone said to me I could not build on the N18 or M18, that would be fine, but this is not that. It is a network of national roads. Interestingly, nearly every road in west Clare has national road classification. It sterilises half our county in terms of future development.