PLANNING AND THE RING OF KERRY: YOU CAN almost hear Jackie Healy-Rae saying it – “the plannin’ is terrible round here”... What some Kerry people mean by this, of course, is not that the landscape has been chewed up by haphazard housing, but that it can be damned difficult to get permission to build in certain areas. The stark statistics do not bear this out. Altogether, there are at least 34,000 one-off houses in the countryside, accounting for more than half of Kerry’s housing stock or seven per kilometre of public road. That’s an awful lot of houses strewn around the landscape of a county that was recently voted the “most scenic” in Ireland. Kerry’s senior planner Paul Stack has been outspoken about the “incredible damage” done by the proliferation of housing. After an absence of 14 years, he “couldn’t believe what I came back to, planning went out of control”. “It’s like the Celtic Tiger – we knew we were wrong and we kept going,” he told councillors in July. “Eighty per cen...
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