Ruadhán Jones
As Fine Gael and the Green Party are locked in disagreement over rural housing policy, Fr Harry Bohan said it’s important to give people the opportunity to live in villages.
Fine Gael’s Junior Housing Minister Peter Burke said recently he expects one-off rural houses to make up 25% of new builds. However, the Green Party wants a focus on revitalising town centres, claiming one-off builds have a social and environmental cost and have contributed to the hollowing out of rural towns.
Fr Bohan, who in the 1970s helped build almost 2,500 houses across 120 villages in rural Ireland through small building schemes, said he “didn’t see anything wrong” with one-off builds.
While in his experience, revitalising rural communities is better done “in numbers” and one-off houses can’t revitalise villages on their own, he said “one facilitated the other”.
“Once people came back, then other people began to build one-off houses,” Fr Bohan said.
“In other words, other young families wanted to stay in the rural areas. One facilitated the other.”
The Clare priest stressed that the important thing was to overcome the belief that “people wouldn’t live in villages anymore”.
“But once given the opportunity people did want to live in the villages and commute a little bit to the bigger towns,” Fr Bohan continued. “But it proved to me that we didn’t have to have the centralisation that got us into real trouble, with Dublin overgrowing and a lot of the west of Ireland becoming a prairie.
“The point of it was that it did revitalise villages – and you had to do it in numbers – because in turn school populations grew and shops got business out of it.”
Updated Rural Housing Planning Guidelines are currently being prepared, with Fine Gael minister Mr Burke due to receive them in the coming weeks.