Michael McDowell: Stop demonising one-off rural housing. Not everyone wants to be surrounded by neighbours
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/05/13/michael-mcdowell-stop-demonising-one-off-rural-housing-not-everyone-wants-to-be-surrounded-by-neighbours/
Posted by B8_B8_B8
29 Comments
This cunt doesn’t want to live near people in the city either
That is fine if someone wants to live in one off housing. However, they should pay higher LPT for the extra burden they create and should waive all rights to moan about wind farms, why there isn’t a bus outside of their door, why a GP is not five minutes walk away etc…
A lot of people living in rural Ireland want the pros of rural living yet expect the services of living in Manhattan.
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.
a fine tradition of being consistently wrong his whole life
To be fair, I don’t want that either, but them’s the breaks….
Even a straw man would be embarrassed to make these arguments.
“If town and village life is so much more sensible and attractive, why do so few people choose to live above the shop in many small rural towns?”
The opinion editor should’ve sent the whole piece back to McDowell.
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.
He knows his electorate, I’ll give him that.
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.
To be honest. As long as the built is reasonably sized, built properly & complies with normal building regs. We shouldnt be forcing people to not build houses in a massive housing shortage
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🤷
The problem with one-off housing is that it makes it harder to provide services to rural areas. Why aren’t we just encouraging more people to actually just live in the village? Within walking distance of the shops, the pub, and a bus stop? That would solve so many issues around access for people who can’t drive, or isolation issues for the elderly.
We don’t need everyone living in an apartment in the city. We just need to encourage more people (not all, just some) to live in the village instead of as far from any other living human as possible.
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.
While I understand that some people want to have a house away from everyone, they also want water, electricity, internet and access to emergency services which cost alot of money to setup for a single house.
Thats the reason why once off housing was blocked as it was wasteful of resources and higher density housing is more cost effective for these services.
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.
We’re stuck in a dichotomy between living in a self-built “one-off” house in the middle of nowhere, vs living in a cookie cutter “estate” in a town or village.
If you look at other European towns on Google maps, most of their suburbs made of self built houses on new streets at the edge of the town, and it’s not ribbon development either. The whole “estate” Vs “one-off” argument doesn’t exist there. I wonder why we’re so different
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
The FFG boyos are out in force today. The comments here are hilarious.
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 will build my one off house in the middle of nowhere, fully off grid, well and own food.
That’s true wealth.
Yeah!!!!! Start demonising Michael McDowell instead!
Translation:
Michael also didn’t want to live next to a Metro station in central Dublin so
A hell of a lot of respect for Michael McDowell in a lot of areas, but the man has just went nuts the last few years.
His arguments here are not at all rational.
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.
This motherfucker still thinks its the celtic tiger what world is he in!
To be fair since moving to an estate I’ve completely changed my mind on one off housing.
The amount of ppl who call to your door in an estate trying to sell you stuff is egregious. It’s non stop