Rural Planning: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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PJ Murphy (FG), Agricultural Panel

I thank the Minister of State for coming into the Seanad today to discuss the very important subject that is rural planning. Coming from County Galway, a strongly agricultural region within convenient commuting distance of Galway city, I can safely say that, throughout my time in politics to date, the subject of rural planning has been the single most contentious and divisive subject that I have dealt with. I welcome the Minister of State's willingness to discuss this topic here today and the Government's ambition to put in place consistent and nationally applicable guidelines on rural planning.
When considering the subject of rural planning, there are a number of important factors that must be taken into consideration. First and foremost among them must be the need and right of rural people to live their lives within the communities they were reared in, where they feel at home and where they belong. Second, we must consider the need for rural communities to survive. We have learned throughout the past century in rural Ireland that rural communities rarely stand still.
They grow and develop or they slowly die. We have seen shops, pubs, post offices, etc. in villages throughout rural Ireland close over the past decade, all while the local authorities imposed stringent planning regulations preventing young couples from building homes in those communities.
Serious consideration must be given to how we picture the Irish countryside in the future. We must ask whether we are willing to reopen Irish rural roads to the prospect of ribbon development. Have we learned lessons from what happened in many areas during the relaxed planning rules of the early Celtic tiger years? In my county, there are many miles of rural roads lined with ribbon development from the Celtic tiger years, with farmers farming land directly behind the homes of people with whom they have no connection. Needless to say, this very often leads to tension and aggravation. This is something that we need to consider.
That being said, with all of this taken into consideration no rural community can be closed to development. As the Minister of State knows, over 540 of our rural villages are without municipal wastewater infrastructure. As such, they have remained closed to development for the past 15 years. While there is light at the end of the tunnel for some of these villages through the new developer-led wastewater infrastructure guidelines, many villages will not qualify under the guidelines as they currently stand due to the lack of river or above-ground drainage in those villages. That, unfortunately, will be the case for virtually every village in the limestone region of south and mid County Galway. If, as a State, we are unable to service our rural villages to a degree that allows them to develop and meet the housing needs of the local population and, at the same time, are unable as a State to generate guidelines or specifications to allow private contractors to do so, then we certainly have an obligation to facilitate the building of homes by rural people in the hinterlands of these villages. I suggest that while the best and most sustainable place to meet the housing needs of our rural people is in local rural villages, but if we are not in a position to facilitate that, which, in many cases, we are not, we must facilitate the building of homes in the rural hinterlands of these villages.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-10