20 Frank McDonald

There is a possibly apocryphal story about a stranger who goes into a West of Ireland bar and, spying a man in the corner in a state of some melancholia, clearly determined upon drinking himself to death, asks of the barman what the matter is with this troubled soul. The barman explains that the man is a carpenter by trade and, once upon a time, was the area’s foremost expert in the construction of stairs. No matter how awkward the job, how confined the quarters, how complicated the configuration, he was called in to advise and implement. He was The Man Who Could Figure Out Stairs. ‘What happened to him at all?’ the stranger enquires. ‘Some bastard,’ replies the barman, ‘invented bungalows.’

One could be forgiven for thinking that many of those who commentate upon the nature of housing and planning in today’s Ireland are secretly related to this unfortunate individual, such is the zeal with which they have taken to condemning the bungalow and all who reside in it. For twenty-five years, until the very recent past, the public conversation seemed to take it for granted that the most significant planning problem facing Irish society was something called ‘bungalow blight’ or ‘one-off housing’, a phenomenon not entirely unique to Ireland but somehow seeming to provoke here a uniquely sanctimonious response. Hardly a week seemed to pass without some architect or planner making an intervention in which the phenomenon of one-off housing was designated the most serious crisis facing the Irish environment, or calling for a commission to be appointed to investigate rural housing. In one such Irish Times article, ‘How We Wrecked Rural Ireland’, one former planner lamented the ‘nests of bungalows’ which he complained were to be found ‘all over the place’. He lambasted Irish people for their lack of appreciation of ‘urban values’ which, he said, might have served to convince people that more beautiful houses could be built in towns and villages. He described bungalows as ‘uniformly awful’ and condemned the trend whereby farmers were able to sell off land as sites, allowing outsiders to come into an area and build more bungalows. He called for a prohibition on the sub-division of family farms for this purpose.

This nonsense all began in the 1980s with a series of articles written in the Irish Times by that newspaper’s otherwise excellent environmental correspondent, Frank McDonald. It was Frank who coined the term ‘bungalow blight’, a play on the title of a book of simple house designs, Bungalow Bliss, which he blamed for the spread of one-off housing in rural areas. He characterized the development as a cancer infecting every part of the country. ‘Throughout the length and breadth of the country,’ he wrote, ‘rural areas are being destroyed relentlessly by this structural litter on the landscape – litter than can never be removed. And this cancer is so pervasive that for every private house built on a suburban housing estate, at least one other house is built in the middle of the countryside.

‘If this was Eamon de Valera’s dream of a country “bright with cosy homesteads”, it has turned into a nightmare. Because what is happening, in effect, is that we are abandoning our towns and villages in favour of colonizing the countryside.’

Frank cited some statistics that, he said, illustrated the ‘frightening’ spread of this bungalow ‘blight’. These indicated that the output of one-off houses in rural areas had doubled, from 5,530 to 11,050, between 1976 and 1983, and was now accounting for more than 53 per cent of all newly built private houses, compared to just 35 per cent ten years before. In County Monaghan, he claimed, one-offs accounted for a ‘staggering’ 80 per cent of all private house completions.

Frank also bemoaned the fact that much of this housing seemed to be ‘urban-generated’ – built for people with no functional connection with agriculture. ‘Most of them work in the nearest city or town, but they choose to live in a rural environment for status reasons or because they simply like the fresh air. In short, they are in the countryside, but not of the countryside. The doctor, the solicitor, even the butcher and the dancehall owner, used to be quite happy with homes in town; now they have fantasies about Southfork-style ranch-houses. Indeed, one of the phenomena of modern Ireland is the proliferation of vast mansions faking Dallas or Dynasty on the outskirts of so many provincial towns – the palazzi gombeeni, as one Dublin architect has scathingly described them.’

Stirring stuff, but actually a load of horlicks. The most graphic communication in this particular article was of the arched condescension with which Dublin architects are wont to regard their fellow citizens. The tragedy is that such a fine journalist should join forces with such prigs against the citizens of a free republic, enabling the discussion about housing and planning policy to become monopolized by self-important Dublin 4 architects who imagined the countryside existing so that they might occasionally drive across it in their big cars. McDonald’s campaign sparked a one-sided, undemocratic debate, conducted on the basis of metropolitan bias, spurious aesthetics, snobbery, dinner party politics and a fundamental lack of perspective on the nature of Irish life. Thanks to the Bungalow Blight campaign, the very idea of a self-standing house in the countryside came to be associated with backwardness, sleveenism and poor taste.

In fact, the figures quoted by Frank McDonald indicate that the increase in one-off housing was occurring within a sustainable model of development based on real human need. In the West of Ireland, certainly, the alleged ‘rural housing sprawl’ that developed from the 1970s onwards, was at last a hopeful sign that the region’s long history of decline and depopulation might be over. People were taking up opportunities to build houses in locations to which they had some family or emotional connection. For the most part, there was little or no speculative dimension, Ireland continued to have one of the lowest levels of population density in Europe, and what was wrong with people preferring the fresh air?

Thus, a tiny elite of interested individuals, with agendas ranging from snobbery to social engineering, managed, by pooling their ambitions and influence, to create an unaccountable and largely invisible nucleus of official prejudice against something as completely harmless as a self-standing house in the countryside.

Meanwhile, but by no means unconnectedly, the real cancer in the Irish planning process went unremarked upon until it was too late.

By the middle of 2008, when the Irish economy finally went into meltdown mode, it began to be clear that the greatest problem facing the Irish planning environment was not one-off housing after all, but, lo and behold, the numbers of houses which had been built in towns and villages, usually as a result of tax incentives, for which there was no prospect of finding buyers or occupiers. Most of these developments had been favoured by planning authorities because of an ideological view that clusters of houses in towns and villages were a vast improvement on one-off housing. With the increasingly prohibitive nature of the planning climate, which in some areas gravitated towards an outright ban on one-off rural housing, people who would once have routinely obtained permission to build homes on their family farms, had ceased to bother asking. Instead, the focus shifted to developers who sought to promote housing schemes within towns and villages, and it was largely from this shift that the crisis developed.

By 2010 it had become clear that the crystallization of the Irish economic disaster was to be located and observed in the phenomenon known as ‘ghost estates’. These were the unoccupied developments that now studded the landscape, usually attached like haemorrhoids to villages and small towns, amounting to some 300,000 housing units that could neither be sold nor rented. Gradually it became clear that the only solution to this problem was to raze all such developments to the ground.

Frank McDonanld cannot be blamed for this situation. Nevertheless, it was what often seemed to be his relentless campaigning on one-off housing that led to the emergence of a culture of unreason in Irish planning circles, and this made the eventual catastrophe inevitable. If, instead of pursuing the ideological path laid down by McDonald, the Irish planning sector had pursued a policy of encouraging one-off housing, it is likely that much of this disaster might have been averted. The Dublin architectural community has been silent on this point.