Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. I also live in rural Ireland in a rural area. I hear this debate about urban Ireland and rural Ireland, one-off housing and so on. I often hear people say it is unsustainable for people to live in rural areas, as if they were building a house hundreds of miles from anywhere. We have a network of roads and we build houses along those existing roads. We also have group water schemes that provide water, which is a critical part of the infrastructure in place in rural Ireland. Nobody builds a house that is not within at least one or two telegraph poles, which is about 100 m, of the ESB lines.

In the vast majority of areas in rural Ireland we have infrastructure but one aspect that is often brought up around one-off housing and rural housing in general is sewerage systems. When one considers the incidence of pollution in our rivers and lakes, most of it comes from either industry or agriculture. Of the small part that comes from sewage, most of that comes from town and village sewerage schemes that do not work properly, rather than from one-off houses and septic tanks that do not work properly. There is a problem in some places with septic tanks not working properly, but this is easily resolved. Engineering developments over the years have resolved such issues. Today, the mechanical treatment systems that go in for one-off rural housing treat the sewage twice as well as the sewage that is treated in a town system. If the sewerage system for one-off housing breaks down for one week or one month, it will take at least that long for the effluent to reach a river, whereas if a system breaks down for two days in a town, there is a huge pollution problem. These issues are easily resolved and can be sorted out.

We must ensure that rural people are given the opportunity to live where they were born, to send their children to the school they attended and to have their children play for the football team they played for. This is what people want to do in rural Ireland. In the parish where I live, the vast majority of people live in one-off rural houses. In County Leitrim, 90% of the people live in rural areas and small villages. Yet, we continually see this bias against people living in one-off houses or rural areas, as if it is a crime to live in one's own house. We need to recognise that we must provide for that as well. It is about balance. We must have proper planning. It cannot be a free-for-all but it can be done properly and appropriately, provided the Government works with people. As I said, the vast majority of people want to get on in life but they need support from the Government to do so.

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