Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As someone who grew up in a rural area, built a house on the farm I grew up on and lived there with my children who attended the same school I did, I certainly support people being allowed to live in a rural area. This is not to say that planning should not be sustainable - it must be and the environment must be protected - but we have to be fair to people who wish to live in a rural community.

I see depopulation occurring in many rural areas. It is having a detrimental effect on communities. We see the schools closing and sports clubs having to amalgamate and so on. I am thinking especially of west Cavan in my constituency as an area that is extremely depopulated. We can see vacant houses, some of them derelict, dotted around the place. People lived in that area at one time and there is no reason they should not be able to live in it again in the future.

All new county development plans should incorporate detailed local strategies based on the housing need and demand assessment, and we need to reverse or prevent population decline. Those plans must also include how the local authority would meet the social housing need for those who wish to live in a rural area. Again, because Cavan-Monaghan is a largely rural area, I have constituents who qualify for social housing and do not want to live in a town or village. They come to me and fill out the form on which rural housing is an option. They tick the option and they have a site but the local authority has not been building houses for social housing applicants for years. This issue needs to be addressed as well. Even if the local authority does not want to build houses, there are enough derelict houses in the countryside that it could buy and convert into social housing for people.

People are buying up derelict or vacant houses and doing them up because it is so difficult to get planning in a rural area now. This is a welcome development which is great to see. The Croí Cónaithe grant helps with that but it is sufficient to incentivise this work. It needs to be increased. Sinn Féin proposed a derelict sites levy to reduce levels of dereliction in rural areas and improve transparency. Getting planning permission is extremely difficult in rural areas. It is also costly. People pay large development levies but do not get the services that others get in towns and cities. This issue also needs to be addressed. The new rural housing guidelines need to simplify and reduce the costs of the planning process.

Farmers need to live on their farms but many other people also need to live in a rural area, for example, the teacher in the local rural school, the vet who wants to be close to the people he or she serves and so on.

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