The Last Word with Matt Cooper
Environment: Planning Regulations For One-Off Housing To Be Eased
28 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
John Gibbons is with us for the last word on the environment.
Chapter 2: What is the housing shortage situation in Ireland?
John, we have a housing shortage in this country. We need, by most agreement, about 50,000 new units a year because we need to make up a backlog of not having built enough houses and apartments. But we're doing about 30,000 to 35,000 a year. There's a shortfall of about 15,000 a year. So park that 15,000 in one place.
Two decades ago, we used to build about 23,000 one-off homes each year in this country.
Chapter 3: How have planning restrictions affected one-off housing?
And then because of planning restrictions and other issues, the number has now dropped to 5,000. Imagine changing all those planning restrictions again to leave people all over the country on their own land to build their own homes.
Might you not make up the shortfall and keep lots of people happy that they wouldn't, they could use their own family land to build the houses that they need and they could come back from foreign places and take up jobs in local areas all over the country. Is the government's idea for the biggest overhaul in rural housing rules in two decades a good one? Yeah, good evening, Matt.
I don't think so. I'm around long enough to remember 2024 when the government featuring the same ministers and Taoiseach Antonis that we have today issued the National Planning Framework.
Chapter 4: What are the potential benefits of easing rural housing regulations?
So this is their best advice in terms of how we strategically plan. This is two years ago, Matt, not 20 years ago. And they said that part of its objectives were to, quote, end the continuous expansion and sprawl of cities and towns into the countryside. So they understood as recently as two years ago that we have a huge problem with the suburbanisation of rural Ireland.
It's bad for rural Ireland. It's very bad for people.
Chapter 5: What concerns are raised about suburban sprawl in rural Ireland?
And it's bad for Ireland as a whole, for a whole variety of reasons. And I would say, Matt, as well, that, you know, sometimes it's very important to do a couple of things. Number one, listen to the experts. The planners are completely against this. I heard one of the guys from the Planning Institute with you here the other day making many solid arguments from a planning point of view.
And their job, they're the professional planners. Their job isn't to get re-elected and to chase votes. Their job is to plan the country in a logical way that makes sense for the future, for the long term.
Chapter 6: How does one-off housing impact local communities and services?
Because when you build a house, you're putting down something that is going to change the landscape for the next century, maybe a lot longer than that. Therefore, planning isn't something that you do willy-nilly and you don't fling houses out along country roads like you're throwing confetti at a wedding. And that is the plan.
But if there are already houses there, and if you're talking about building houses in the back garden or adjacent to existing houses that you're sort of filling in alongside what's there, aren't you giving people who otherwise would not be able to afford houses or apartments in urban settings the opportunity to have somewhere affordable to live? Well, that's an argument.
But the argument that the professional planners will counter that with is that we need to organise our societies, our cities, our towns, our villages. Now, I'll put it to you this way, Matt, that the suburban sprawl and the suburbanisation of rural Ireland
Chapter 7: What are the environmental implications of increasing one-off housing?
is also, conversely, the thing that is destroying our towns and villages. It is hollowing them out. That's why you've got the pubs in those villages that are shut down. You've got the local shops that have failed because the people who would normally have lived within the catchment area for walking, for cycling, for very short drives, they're now living scattered out in the countryside.
They're driving past their local village and town, and they're going on to the Lidl in the next major town. So we get the hollowing out of rural Ireland. We also, of course, get a whole bunch of other effects that go with it.
For example, the cost of delivering services for the Irish state, whether it's electricity services, whether it's broadband, whether it's postal service, doctors, community nurses, guardi, firefighters – All of these costs are since spiralling when you have to provide to access people in once-off houses, up country lanes here and there.
Now, I'm not for a moment arguing against people who have a genuine reason to live in rural Ireland. So, for example, the farming community and other people who are genuinely based in rural Ireland. But what we're doing here is this suburbanisation process.
goes against not just the professional planning advice here in Ireland, but if you look to the UK, if you go to England, you go to France, you go to Italy and Spain, these are countries that have been at this a long time. You have towns, you have villages and you have hamlets, Matt. And in between them, you have the countryside.
The only one-off buildings you'll see in rural France and rural Spain are farmsteads. They do not allow the countryside to be scattered willy-nilly with houses. Now, you'll have seen reports in recent days that 300,000 septic tanks have been found to be defective. I know you've discussed it on the programme. In fairness, a sample suggests that many are defective. That's right.
That's not how many who have been found to be defective. But if you do random sampling, that's the estimated number. And I think it's a fair estimate.
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Chapter 8: How do data centres affect Ireland's electricity grid and costs?
So... Simon Harris and co. are suggesting, let's lash out another 100,000 once-off houses out across rural Ireland. Let's each of them have to build its own septic tank. Let's each of them be discharging grey water into the environment. Where do you think that's going to end up? We know we can't manage the septic tanks that we have already.
So there's a few other things, Matt, that I think are worth discussing. For example, let's say 100,000, let's say we put in 100,000 extra houses, right? on average, they'll use a half acre site each. That's 50,000 acres of prime agricultural land lost. I haven't heard a single person say this, right?
Hang on though, if you're using land at the back of a house, that may not be used for agriculture. No, by and large, the type of rural housing that we're talking about here are the ones that are built along the roads that are taking bites, half acre, three quarters of acre, one acre sites built along. And they're eating into prime agricultural land. Now,
We get very exercised in certain parts of the country about the loss of land, for example, for solar farms. But when it comes to one-off housing, not a bother. OK, this one says, that gentleman has no idea about the quality attached to rural living. You grew up on a farm. I grew up on a farm. And if I can add to that, right, what we're doing here is baking in a few things, right?
Number one is car dependency. Number two is rural isolation. We had a survey, as you know, you covered it on this programme recently, that's showing that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe. One in five Irish people are lonely. Now, once-off, isolated rural homesteads are a big part of rural isolation.
Now, people might start out with the best of intentions, but we all, the clock is running on us, we all get old. Next thing we find that we're aged, we're unable, maybe we can no longer drive, and suddenly that ideal rural house that you built that was great, had a bit of land, it suddenly becomes a trap, you're now stuck in it.
Maybe you can't drive, you're isolated from your neighbours, you can't get to the local shop, you can't get to mass. That's what we're storing up for, Matt, for the future. A listener says, not everyone wants to be forced into living in cities and towns. OK, another issue this week.
We'd heard that the EPA said that basically this idea of hitting 51% reduction in our emissions by the end of the decade is dead as a dodo. If we get to 25%, we'd have done well. Minister Dara O'Brien, who's responsible for this, says we'll do it in the 2030s. Yeah, we'll do it manana, I think is what Dara O'Brien is saying.
And if we look at the data, Matt, from this report, realistically, on current... trajectory. We're not going to do 25%. We're going to do, at best, 13%. We're going to achieve about one quarter of our target. You know, that's not bad, though, when you consider how much the population of the country has grown over the last decade, how many more people have worked.
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