Lorna Fitzpatrick

So Brenda speaks about how she lives in an urban area and on her street, I think there's about 30 houses.

And there was a, as she calls them, a young enterprising neighbour who has decided to, over the last couple of weeks, organise a bit of a street party so that, you know, there was burgers and barbecues and things like that for everybody to get out and get to know each other, which is a fantastic idea and is supported by local authorities, which Brenda has noted.

And what she said, interestingly, was that even though she's lived on that street for over three decades, she actually knew very few people who also lived on that street.

I'm sure.

Have you seen this cat?

But I suppose the essence of her point was that community isn't necessarily just based on proximity of housing.

And I think that's a really interesting point.

And as somebody who lives in Wexford and had been trying for quite some time over the past number of years to build a house, we had looked at purchasing two different sites to see if we could add.

We were turned down.

Well, we never even got to the formal application process because the architect told us that one won't work because it'll be ribbon development.

So that one empty space in that line of 10 houses.

So there's five and then there's a gap and then there's another five.

That won't suffice because that's classed as ribbon development.

So you can't get planning there.

and everything were coming there anyway all there but we couldn't get it because we would be the sixth house and the other we couldn't get because we would be backland development so we couldn't even go in behind the existing houses and put up big trees or do whatever we could do to create a blockade because that would have been classed as So you must be delighted now that the government is going to make that Well they weren't just bought a house so but yeah

Yes, absolutely.

Everyone we spoke to was really, they were really positive about the idea.