Rural Planning: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Aubrey McCarthy (IND), University of Dublin

I thank the Minister of State for being here. As many of my colleagues have said, it is not necessarily about housing but about whether rural communities can survive and whether rural towns, villages, etc., can have a future. I am on the housing committee and over the last number of weeks we have had the GAA in. Its representatives were saying it is impossible to get players for towns throughout Ireland. We are all agreed we need more homes but we need balanced regional development and then rural Ireland will benefit from that growth. There are too many young people who want to stay in their communities but cannot rent, cannot buy and in some cases cannot build. I live in rural Kildare and trying to get planning permission, even on the farm I have, is difficult. Recently we had residents of the Gaeltacht in and we heard from them how, while the Government is committed to protecting the Irish language, many of them cannot get planning permission to live in their own community, so it seems the Government’s policy on protecting the Irish language and its policy on housing and planning are contradicting each other. People who own heritage properties were saying the Government has a wonderful plan on maintaining and restoring properties, which is fantastic, but a lot of them feel their experience shows it is impossible to maintain those properties. Good policies, it seems, can sometimes end up working against each other on the ground.
Rural communities have the capacity to grow. There are serviced lands, vacant buildings and underutilised sites all around Ireland, and vacancy and dereliction grants have been wonderful. They have kicked the ball out of the park regarding success, but grants alone are not enough. The biggest barriers remain infrastructure and planning, and villages cannot grow unless we get infrastructure sorted out. The heart of this is giving people an opportunity to live, work and raise a family in their own communities.

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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