Michael McDowell: Hören Sie auf, einmalige ländliche Wohnungen zu verteufeln. Nicht jeder möchte von Nachbarn umgeben sein

This cunt doesn’t want to live near people in the city either

Those people should stop complaining about the quality of roads in rural areas, and the level of traffic if they are traveling to any of the cities then.

Those are the consequences that come with one-off housing.

To be fair, I don’t want that either, but them’s the breaks….

Council rezoned my parents house Into the nearby village after 2 new estates were constructed. The village has a single pub, no other amenities of any kind, not even a shop. So now im not allowed to build a house now and they want me to go into an estate, 10 minutes from nearest shop. Why the fuck would I do that! Worst of both worlds. All it did was force me out of my local area and buy a house somewhere else.

An uncomfortable truth for living in an estate is you have no control over who your neighbours are. Ive been on the market looking for a house and auctioneers will literally tell you „id be wary of that estate its 80% social housing but this other one is only 10%“. Then you get the stories of the CC moving in certain families that couldn’t give a shit about society or law in general and the advice you get is tough shit, put up or sell up.

Its a legitimate criticism on the system that we expect too little of some and too much of others. Not everyone wants to roll the dice on a 35 year mortgage hoping their neighbours are good people. Weve all seen the advice requests here from people strugling with neighbours that the CC put in but wont discipline about boise, litter or worse behaviour. You can avoid that by buying a house in the country.

I live in a ‚one-off‘ old farmhouse, built in 1890. I fully expect that the number of services, and the quality thereof sometimes, be far lesser than those provided to urban dwellers. Rubbish collection is a big issue for us, for example, but that’s just the price to be paid.

The point I would make against McDowell here is that one-off rural housing plays almost no part in sustaining rural life or, more particularly, village life. To live in one-off housing means that you have a car, and it means that you either work from home or travel by car to some conurbation to work. You go to the gym in town, you do your shopping in town, you use the post office in town, you use the health services in town. You pretty much never interact with ‚village‘ infrastructure (if there even is any) outside of the local school and GAA club (if that).

There is a conflation being made by McDowell, and others who want to build their house on the half-acre from Dad, between living in the countryside and ‚rural life‘. One does not mean the other. Rural life depends on active, sustainable, and socially and commercially viable villages of which there only a handful left. Ireland, in trying to support rural life by rolling out broadband to every door, killed off the main leverage she had on trying to get people to live in villages again. Coupled with this, a lot of villages that could have been developed were not because the sewage and water facilities weren’t there and the state wasn’t interested in providing them. Villages can’t grow, people no longer actively need them, and ‚rural life‘ is essentially dead. Hamlets have already disintegrated. All you get now are small clusters of houses all built by and for the same family, joined by long ribbons of McMansions built in the 80’s and 90’s.

If they were self sufficient it would be fine but they put a strain on resources.

It was cheaper for me to build a house then to buy an estate house in my local town.

And due to how much of a clusterfuck traffic is in said town it sends huge traffic out to rural areas anyway, towns are just not designed well here at all here , they throw estates up anywhere with seemingly no thought for how to deal with the traffic.

I’d have had no problem living in a town but the cons far outweighed the benefits🤷

One-off housing isn’t practical, and your right to one-off housing is far less important than building communities that make sense.

The government should be zoning, planning and developing plots for housing, and taking the speculation out of large scale and single-house development.

Identify suitable locations, apportion the land into plots, and set aside space for services (shops, childcare, whatever is needed for a given area).

We massively overstate the demand for one-off housing, and underestimate the difficulties it creates.

One-off housing is grand, in the middle of nowhere. But if you own land in a city or town, there should be restrictions on low density builds. I would even extend that to a forecast of how that urban area is supposed to grow in the next 50 or 100 years. No point in allowing one-off builds just outside a city’s boundaries if in 20 years it’ll be consumed by the city anyway. You see it all over our urban areas, houses built in the tiger now dwarfed by apartment blocks on nearby sites. Not to mention that gives the owner a chance to object to these developments because they can argue a number of points about light, character of area, traffic, amenities, environment, among other things. The planning laws are the crux of the issue in Ireland.

It’s not necessarily demonising one-off housing, it’s demonising:
– Inadequate and unmaintained septic tanks leaking sewage into groundwater and rivers
– People drinking unsafe groundwater from boreholes
– The government having to spend huge amounts on infrastructure, e.g. power lines
– Emergency services (e.g. ambulances) having to drive long distances along poor quality roads
– Carers having to drive long distances to visit the homes of elderly / disabled people
– Excess traffic from car dependent people
– Social isolation, particularly for kids have to be driven everywhere

I’d be all for this provided one-off housing accepts to foot the higher costs for services like water, electricity, roads etc.

If you want this, then it’s really not up to urban folk to subsidise it for you.

I’m freshly shocked every day at how many people are just like selfish children. “I don’t want to live near people,” “I don’t want solar panels and wind turbines because I don’t like how they look,” “I don’t want people to migrate here, I just want this whole country to ourselves!” So much of politics today is dominated by the voices of people who act like spoiled little kids. Grow up! We share the country, you have to have neighbours! You have to occasionally cross paths with other people!

Not saying this guy holds any anti immigrant sentiment btw, I don’t know the guy, but it’s this thread of entitlement that I see running through politics that catches my eye. Despite the stereotypes, it is most often people of a conservative bent who act this way too, as well as business owners and wealth holders. Regardless of what you think of them, people on the left are crying out to pay more in taxes if it leads to better healthcare, more social housing, free education. There’s a real “fuck you, got mine” flavour to the centre and right that is so juvenile.

Translation:


He’s right, I wanna get out town in a few years for peace and quiet

Leaving aside the aesthetics of one-off rural housing (it’s not great, admittedly), does anyone know of any actual data on how much more a family living in a rural home costs the exchequer when compared with that same family living in a town? Controlling for income, etc. I just ask as I’m really not sure of the scale here, and I fear this whole thing could just deepen the rural/urban divide while the same factors that have been making life difficult for us continue to plague the country.

Okay, but pay the actual cost of providing power to these houses. And stop objecting to wind farms. And don’t complain about not being able to drive drunk home.

Ive lived in dublin for a bit (8-9years).

It sucks. I have no space to build a workshop for my hobbies (working on cars/motorcycles/machining/welding etc) like I enjoyed at home, my motorcycles have been stolen once and attempted stolen twice, theres constant just background noise I can never get used to (theres trains blowing horns at 2:30am at sandyford depot? I thought they shut off at midnight?) I dont like living beside people and cars and just….it’s just loud and unnerving, I often drive 1hr30minutes home just so I can enjoy home, my old bed, the animals, the space to work on my personal projects etc

Now Im looking to buy and I hate the locals only conditions, because Im local to Carlow, I could build there, but I need to commute to Dublin (only place for work) so rock and a hard place. Im trying to see if I can get somewhere in the wicklow area with an acre site or so to build a workshop but its tough.

I understand why the restrictions exist….but I will never be comfortable somewhere loud with little space and am more than happy to tolerate worse roads, pay for my own well,septic tank etc. The only real extra costs are the roads, the electricity and the fibre cables, which for the most part already exist, its just extra maintenance and I dont really mind if there was increased utility bills to go with them.

McDowell, architect of the 27th Amendment and creator of stateless children in this country. Not a great one to follow on „neighbours“

Said Irish boomer.

Omg people get some Europeans to do urban planning and public transport consult.