Rural Planning: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Joe Flaherty (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach I will go on and talk about the 2005 sustainable housing guidelines. As many speakers have said, they are well overdue a revision. I do not think rural planning needs the big shake-up that some people say. The problem with rural planning is subjectivity. There is a planner in County Longford and a planner in Galway. If they are given the exact same planning application, they will not give the same answer. The problem with rural planning is subjectivity. Everyone has a different view. I do not envy anyone who is going to bring out the new guidelines to tackle that. It is very difficult to tackle subjectivity. If I have a concern about what has been set out in the proposal, it is the timeline. My colleague, Senator Boyhan is looking for a detailed and extensive public consultation, which is very welcome, but it is going to take time. The problem for us is that across the country at the minute, we have a problem with our planners in terms of subjectivity. There is absolutely no consistency in how planners will treat a planning application, notwithstanding the guidelines that are already in place. Every one of them has a completely different interpretation. I will give some examples. I have seen planning applications in recent months where a lady had a six-bedroom house. She is separated. Her son was coming back from the UK with his young family. She wanted to build a small house on the farm and she wanted the son and his family to move into the large house. That made eminent sense to me but it did not make any sense to a planner, who said that because she had got planning for this house 25 years ago, she was not entitled to look for planning for another house. Fortunately she reapplied and she got the planning. I had another instance where the planner came back to somebody and, because they were looking for a new house on their father's land, they were told there was no identifiable housing need in that area. We and the Opposition all agree that there is a housing crisis in the country and a housing need in every part of Ireland. For a planner to come back and say something like that is quite incredible. The guidelines are great but we need a quick fix for this. Some directive needs to be sent to all our local authorities on rural planning to say we are going to have these new guidelines. They are fantastic, but with the best will in the world, it is hard to see them coming into place in the lifetime of this Government. We need meaningful action and engagement with our planners right across the country. Planners do not like to be told what to do. They certainly do not like to be told what to do by councillors, Senators or TDs. The Department does need to bring in our rural planners and set out to them exactly the challenges that people are facing in Ireland. I always say that the people who are the most immune and do not understand that there is a housing crisis are often the officials, civil servants and, in many cases, the planners. They do not understand the scale of the crisis people are facing, particularly young people starting out with their first home. I would welcome if the Minister of State could take this message back to the Department and if consideration could be given to bringing all the planners together, having a think tank session to see the blockages that are there and perhaps get consensus among planners and agreement on what we should be doing. In their defence, I will say some fantastic houses are being built right across rural Ireland. There is an element of consistency in the quality of some of them, and the planners are to be commended on that. While I have the Minister of State here, I will mention a few other points. There is the question of downsizing, especially in large and provincial towns. We have a lot of elderly people. In many cases, one person who would like to downsize is living alone in what could be a four-bedroom or five-bedroom house, but there are no small bungalows for them to move to. We need to look at the situation. Some local authorities in Dublin did offer a scheme where it was possible for people to sell their home and get a local authority property. In many cases, these are small developments of two-bedroom units. They are ideal for people looking for companionship and having people living next door. It is almost a retirement village setting. I think there is a huge opportunity there. It would free up these larger houses and get them back on the market. It makes eminent sense to me and I would like to see the Department giving this idea some consideration. The other point I ask the Minister of State to take back is that our current social housing model is challenged insofar as the income thresholds are concerned. We need to look at this aspect. I fear a section of our community has also fallen between two stools. These are people ineligible for social housing and unable to afford a mortgage. We need to look at bringing back a variation of the rent-to-buy scheme, where people would not qualify for social housing but could qualify for a social house based on it being rented to buy. People would be given ten years to buy the house, paying a rent much higher than what would be paid in social housing. People would then have an option to buy out the balance after the ten years. I think there is merit in looking at this idea as well. It would work well for the holistic effect of these communities. We would get in the aforementioned and much lauded gardaí, teachers and all those people into these communities. It would be very much about building our communities and empowering people. I would like if the Minister of State could take back these two suggestions with him. I commend him on his work on these guidelines and I do earnestly hope they can come into effect before the end of the lifetime of this Government. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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