Macra President Calls for Liberalized Rural Planning for Young Farmers

Josephine O’Neill, Macra national president, advocates for liberalizing rural planning guidelines to allow one-off housing, especially for young people from farming backgrounds building on family land. She argues this is crucial for securing rural Ireland's future, enabling young people to live, work, and raise families in their home areas.

O’Neill highlights the decline of rural services and the increasing isolation of farming, with only 4% of the workforce in agriculture and 4.3% of farmers under 35. She stresses that granting planning permission for one-off homes, not just for farmers but for other family members, is vital for maintaining support networks. She addresses concerns about housing sprawl and service costs, noting young people are willing to pay for connections and new builds often include electric car charging points.

Conversely, Brendan O’Sullivan argues that a liberalized approach to individual rural houses will not reverse rural decline or revitalize the economy. He believes these are deep structural challenges requiring a different scale of intervention, such as creating strong rural towns and villages with robust infrastructure and services. O’Sullivan also points out that planning authorities already allow generous exceptions for rural people to build on family land and that the current case-by-case approach prioritizes private good over common good, leading to scattered, uncoordinated development that is expensive to service and reliant on private cars.