Wexford villages will be ‘dead in 15 years’ without urgent housing development

By Simon Bourke, Wexford People

Rural villages in Co Wexford will be effectively “dead in 15 years” unless the local council can find a way to build serviceable developments within them. While it has the ability to acquire land in rural areas, Wexford County Council (WCC) has been repeatedly hampered by the lack of wastewater treatment facilities in its villages.

And with Uisce Éireann opting to focus its attention on urban areas there is a genuine fear that the county’s villages will slowly empty as people search for viable housing options elsewhere.

At the June meeting of the New Ross Municipal District (NRMD) Councillor Marty Murphy asked what WCC could do to prevent these villages from dying.

“What is our policy on cluster developments in villages?” he asked. “Uisce Éireann (UE) is clearly not going to service them so we need to have a plan as a council to allow developments to go ahead with their own wastewater treatment services.”

Cllr Murphy received support from Cllr Michael Sheehan.

“My understanding is we can supply wastewater for once-off and linear projects,” he said. “But places like Ramsgrange are literally going to be dead in 15 years because of the demographics there; people are moving on, there’s no houses being built, the schools will end up having to close or amalgamate. We need to try and build 8-10 housing developments in our villages, if we’re waiting on UE to do it those villages will be dead.”

After the meeting executive planner Eoghan Nolan circulated a section of the County Development Plan (CDP) which went some way towards explaining the council’s policy on cluster developments in rural areas.

“There is no specific policy that details the requirements of cluster developments, but these would not be considered in rural areas and only generally only in a designated town, village or rural node.”

According to the CDP, the rural nodes in the NRMD include Cushinstown, Poulpeasty, and Horeswood – Ramsgrange is listed as a large village.

Broken down into categories the CDP lists Campile, Clonroche, Wellingtonbridge, and Taghmon as ‘settlements’, and states, “there are no public wastewater services nor will there be in most of our settlements”.

"It is contrary to the plan to provide private shared treatment plants for residential development. Therefore, the houses need to have individual treatment systems at a density acceptable to environment,” the CDP reads.