I receive calls weekly regarding planning permission rejections, with some people spending between €15,000 and €20,000 in the planning process before any works are done. This is not just hearsay. It was reported at the May meeting of Louth County Council that planning permission was refused for 40% of rural homes in Louth in 2022. This means that 70 out of the 177 planning applications for rural dwellings were rejected in 2022, affecting 70 families.

From 2021, Louth’s planning permission requirements in rural areas are very restrictive when compared with the rest of the country, especially in relation to the local needs requirement. Louth is a small county and we are starting to run out of suitable sites. We need to help rural areas to sustain and grow into the future. While the population and housing need in County Louth will continue to grow by about 20%, statistics in the Louth county development plan indicate that housing in rural areas will only be permitted to grow by around 9.4% from 2021 to 2027. Why is there such a disparity? Rural communities are being, and will continue to be, greatly impacted if this does not change.

Housing in rural Ireland has always been a major difficulty. All politicians know that there are issues with planning. What we find in my area of Louth and east Meath is that young people are being refused planning permission in rural areas because of considerations relating to the scenic landscape and this, that and the other. The variation in the reasons for refusal is shocking in a time of housing crisis. It seems to me that the planning policies that are being put before councils today are very anti-rural in nature. They are pushing people from rural communities into bigger towns and villages, which is very unfair.

The average age for somebody leaving the parental home in Ireland is now 28 years. It used to be 23 or 24 years of age but now people are spending four or five more years at home than they would have done 15 or 20 years ago. We have to turn that around. If young people want to remain in rural areas, they are being forced to extend their parent’s home in order to gain planning permission. Obviously, there are some stipulations that must be met but applicants will generally not be refused point blank because it is an existing house. However, if they want to build on family land in rural areas in Louth, they are being rejected.

We have got to look at housing from every angle. As I said earlier, there are people who are finding it almost impossible to get planning permission in my community. The Rural Independent Group brought forward a motion last week in the Dáil in respect of easing the restrictions on planning with recommendations to look at alternative housing design and models of housing, such as log cabins and modular homes. These offer a way to assist young people into home ownership. However, this approach seems to be discouraged, with excessive restrictions on rural planning permission. I hope that there can be a change in mindset on that. It is absurd that the current over-burdensome restrictions on planning permission in rural areas are still in place when the country is facing a growing homelessness crisis. We need up to 62,000 homes built per year until 2050 to meet demand.

Local authorities have agreed to review their policy as the current restrictive rules mean applicants are being refused. Can the Tánaiste outline the planned measures to alter and ease rural planning guidelines, housing design and housing models so we can unlock the potential of delivering twice as many homes in the same location? I believe that this can be changed by ministerial directive and in doing so, we can alleviate the housing crisis and aid the development of rural Ireland.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I would say at the outset that there is no cap or ban on the granting of planning permission for new homes in rural Ireland.

There is in County Louth

Planning authorities provide a target for new housing as part of their statutory development plan, including for rural areas outside of their towns and villages. There is one statistic that may not be well known, which is that it has generally been one quarter of delivery nationally for the last 30 years. In terms of overall house construction, one quarter has been new rural homes, including one-off houses. About 4,000 to 5,000 homes built every year are rural homes. That gets lost in all of the narrative around the undoubted challenges in planning for housing, particularly one-off housing.

Both current and draft planning guidelines allow county development plans to provide for rural housing. The planning system in Ireland continues to deliver a substantial number of planning permission decisions for new homes every year in Ireland, including 42,991 permitted homes in 2021 and 34,177 in 2022. This includes permission for 7,499 one-off homes in 2021 and 6,924 in 2022, the vast majority of which are located in rural areas. There is strong housing provision in rural areas. Last year we built close to 30,000 houses nationally, a 45% increase on 2021. Of these, 5,515 or 18.4% were single, one-off dwellings in rural Ireland. New dwelling completions in rural areas were up by 16.6% in 2022 compared to 4,069 built in 2021. There is a balance needed in the debate.

In Louth, about 789 new dwellings were completed in 2022. However, 143 single houses were built in Louth in 2022. This amounts to 18% of total completions, which is similar to the figure for 2020 of 18.4% and 2021 of 18.7%. That ratio corresponds broadly with what is happening nationally. Rural housing is delivering nearly one fifth of annual housing output in Louth. The Louth county development plan for 2021 to 2027 contains a housing delivery target of around 1,300 new homes per year for the county, which is substantially above the 789 units that were built in 2022. There is also a significant amount of social housing being built in County Louth. Around 1,000 social houses have been delivered since 2020.

The other important scheme-----

The time is up.

Will I have a chance to come back in with supplementary remarks?

Yes.

I live in County Louth and I know what is going on there. The refusal rate in rural County Louth was 40%. That equates to 70 families that have to live in mobile homes, live with friends or live wherever they can because they cannot get planning permission. The Government is instructing local authorities to build houses on local authority-owned land. However, our local authorities are refusing landowners and families to build on their land. That is a contradiction. There is a housing crisis at the moment. The Government is considering putting people out at sea or anywhere else where it can find homes but one thing this country has is loads of land. Can we not just get up off our backsides and for once and for all look after these people who have no homes? I know families in County Louth that have hundreds of acres of land but they cannot build on that land.

I ask the Tánaiste and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to come to County Louth to investigate what is going on. Something serious is going on at the moment. The Tánaiste should see the answers applicants are given. They get abrupt answers which suggest that they should not ring the council because they have got their answer, end of story. There is a crisis in this country at the moment. There are lots of things in this country that I do not like, including demonstrations and everything else but people are frustrated that they cannot build on their own land. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Thank you Deputy.

I know of a young girl who is married with two children. Her family has loads of land - 40 or 50 acres. What did the council tell her? It told her to build an extension onto the existing house of 50 sq. m. One cannot put a family into an extension measuring 50 sq. m.

The time is up Deputy.

The family already has the granny living in the house. I want the Tánaiste and the Minister to come to County Louth and have a look.

Please Deputy.

The refusal rate was 40%, meaning that 70 families were refused planning permission last year. It is not acceptable in a housing crisis. I am listening to gardaí on radio stations talking about this. We have a problem-----

Deputy, please. You are way over time.

Let us start looking after the people in the area. I know I will see the Tánaiste on Saturday in Navan but more importantly, I ask him to look after these families with their homes. That is all I am saying. He should come to County Louth with the Minister.

The match at the weekend is in Navan.

Give us a few penalties and the whole stadium will be happy.

We go forward with all modesty and so on.

In respect of the issue, I was going to mention the vacant and dereliction grants which give real opportunities but I take the Deputy's point. I understand the sincerity of what the Deputy is saying in terms of people who want to build on their family's land. The overall planning policy over the years has been to try to move to areas that are contiguous to villages and towns for services including sewerage, amenities and so on. That has been the preferred policy direction. However, most county development plans have provision for cases where people can build on the family land if it is a farm, with proper planning frameworks to guide such development. Obviously, I am not aware of the specifics in every county area but if permission has been given to build an extension to an existing house-----

Of 50 sq. m. One would not be able to get two horses in there.

To me, that would suggest that a bit of pragmatic common sense-----

Please come to County Louth and-----

Hold on, Deputy, please.

-----facilitate a resolution of this particular issue.

There is a housing crisis.

I cannot get involved in every individual issue but I take the Deputy's point.