Rural Planning: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
============================================================

Maria McCormack (SF), Labour Panel

I welcome the opportunity to talk about rural planning and how important it is for rural communities. I have come from the social protection committee, where we have had the GAA in. Those witnesses have been telling us about declining demographics. I see this happening. I see it in the village I come from, Ballyroan. We can see the impact this has, so I really welcome the opportunity for us to try to make a difference here. Every week since I started in this job, someone has contacted me who has not been able to get planning permission on their own land. I grew up on a farm and I know the problems that come with that. I want to talk about the progress we can make and positive steps forward. The Minister of State will have to agree that, over the years, there have been many plans and promised actions but these have not materialised into work on the ground.
Good rural planning means investing in the delivery of social and affordable homes in rural towns and villages by making it easier and cheaper for people to reuse vacant and derelict homes and by ensuring that rules on one-off homes are clear, fair and consistently applied across all local authorities. In my county of Laois, the affordable housing targets have been set incredibly low - I would say stupidly low. Does the Minister of State know that the target for affordable housing in Laois was set at eight houses for 2026? Thankfully, the county council has managed to provide a few more houses than that figure, but I would love to know why the affordable home target for Laois is so low in the first place.
I will say this again because it is a clear signal of how rural constituencies like County Laois are forgotten. The county has a population of 92,000 people and the affordable housing target set for the county was eight affordable homes in 2026. I would like to hear back from the Minister of State on this. I speak to ordinary workers and families from Laois every week who tell me they are a few hundred euro over the income threshold for social housing but are in no way close to ever being able to buy. We will not even talk about the rental market, because the Government has clearly made a shambles of that. The Minister of State knows the story. People have been telling us every day for years how their dignity and independence have been torn from them by the housing crisis, especially by the lack of properly affordable homes. I thank the Minister of State for coming in to discuss this issue.

---

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