Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. As someone who has grown up in a rural community, who still lives in a rural community and who would live nowhere else in the world, I know the importance of proper planning and getting planning right for our rural communities. As my colleague Deputy Ó Broin said, the housing crisis is not unique to our urban areas and larger towns. It is just as much a crisis in our rural communities. We need to get planning right for our rural communities. If we do not get it right, then houses are not built, families are not reared in rural communities, rural communities do not exist and they die. That is what happens if we do not get planning right. We lose so much more than just where that house is located; we lose an entire way of life that so many of us who live in rural Ireland enjoy. It is a place where we want to live and rear our families, but we need to be facilitated by Government to have the support and the services that follow those houses where they are built.

It has been said, and it is stated in this motion, that the rural planning guidelines need to be published. We have now been waiting for them for years. The current situation where local authorities have different rules here, there and everywhere does not work. We need to see those guidelines. They need to be fair and they need to consider people, like me, who typically are born in rural area, grow up and are reared in it, and want to live in it. They are the people we are talking about. As has also been said, there is depopulation in rural areas and addressing that needs to be part of the plan. In many cases, young people who grew up in a rural area want to live beside their ageing parents or near the family farm. That is where they want to live and that is how we need to be looking at this.

We also need to be building communities with all those services. Garda stations, post offices and schools have closed and those services have been lost. We need to do more than just build the houses; we need to build communities. That means services to sustain our rural communities so people can actually live where they want to live and are not discriminated against for living there.

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