Rural Planning: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel I would love to have about 20 minutes on this. I welcome this debate very much. I hope Minister of State is listening to the suggestions because this is a big bugbear of mine. Good suggestions have been made here today, but I do not see anybody taking notes and that bugs me too. We have harsh planning restrictions that have been a plague on rural communities, so I am delighted to see that the Government is finally listening to what we have been saying for years. We need to be careful about the rules, particularly local needs rules, being relaxed so much that rural house prices are pushed up. That is what happened in the Celtic tiger era. I know it is houses but I would be afraid that if we relaxed the local needs rules in respect of planning, the same would happen again. I live in the town of Bailieborough. It is within the commuter belt of Dublin and lots of Dublin people sold their houses, came down and priced young couples out of the market in my town. I would be afraid of that happening again and would want to mitigate against that. I truly believe that local authorities and councillors are best placed to understand the needs of their own areas but that they are operating within very strict guidelines and their hands are tied. There is a top-down approach from the Government and the Planning Regulator. Ireland has one of the most centralised governments in Europe and we all know that. We should trust our local authorities more and devolve more power to them. Everywhere is different and a one-size policy cannot fit everywhere. In west Cavan, we have very bad depopulation. In east Cavan, we have a very high population. Councils are best equipped to deal with these differences in population and spread. I am a big believer that strategies should place an emphasis on serviced sites. I see it happening in Canada. My sons live in Canada and the local authority buys or has a plot of land and develops it into lots. The services are there, such as electricity and water. It is so easy then for people to go in and build on these serviced sites. They are----- --- 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