Decline of rural Cork sparks urgent calls for planning to be eased – ‘we’re crying out for people’

By Peter McCarthy, Corkman

Cork County Council is to write to the housing minister to ask that the rural planning guidelines be made less stringent to make it easier for people to build and settle in rural Ireland in an effort to boost declining communities.

In a motion brought before this week’s meeting of the council, Cllr Bernard Moynihan called for the guidelines to be updated to allow relatives to build on family land and to allow people to buy and build on sites in rural areas. He also asked that local authorities be given more flexibility when making planning decisions in rural areas.

The North Cork councillor said rural areas are “crying out for numbers. You take places like Knocknagree, Ballydesmond, Kiskeam, Cullen, all those places back in Duhallow, we have the facilities, the GAA grounds, the community centres, the astroturf pitches, they’re all there. My view is that we should make planning in rural Ireland as easy as possible for people and particularly for people who are building on their own land.”

“When you have a father and mother and only one person can get a site, it's just creating problems. Now a lot of the time it's not actually our own people here in the council because they're doing their best. Planning is tricky and they're doing their best in the vast majority of cases to make things happen. I'm saying that national guidelines should be relaxed. The councils and the planners have to be trusted to make their own decisions,” he said.

The motion received wide cross-party support from the other councillors.

Cllr Joe Carroll said the national planning framework “fell flat on its face. We were supposed to get people back to rural Ireland. To be fair to our own [planning] panels, they do their best but they're going by the guidelines they get from Dublin. Planning in rural Ireland has to be re-looked at.”

Cllr Peter O’Donoghue said rural areas in places like North Cork are in severe decline. “They have small numbers in schools, they're struggling to maintain those numbers, GAA teams are struggling to maintain numbers, shops are closing, post offices are closing. All the planning is centred around Dublin and Cork and the metropolitan areas. The minister needs to relook at his strategy.”

"In Cork County Council we need to look at our strategy as well when it comes to the next county development plan in relation to planning. Instead of us focusing on areas such as Midleton and Carrigtwohill and Carrigaline with massive populations, we need to spread the housing in County Cork and take an overall look at the county and help those small, struggling communities,” he said.

Cllr Finbarr Harrington said “it's really important that people understand how important it is to have just one family move into a small rural area. I live myself on the tip of the Beara Peninsula and you know the joy in the parish when a planning permission is approved and a young family is back in there, you can feel it through the whole parish. Because what it means is you're going to have a few kids extra going to school, you're going to have a few kids extra playing sport, the shop is secured, that's how important it is.”

The council will now write to the housing minister on the issue. “The point we need to make to the government is that the facilities are there in rural Ireland. Money has been pumped into GAA clubs, schools, creches, the whole lot, and now we need the population,” Cllr Moynihan said.