Community activists in Dingle, Co Kerry, officially An Daingean, have blamed housing and planning policies for "shunting local people into housing estates behind the town, or out of town altogether".
In a critical assessment of Kerry County Council's local area plan for Dingle, Seán Brosnan and Peter Malone said locals could no longer buy property in the central area of the town because it was being taken over by holiday homes. At the same time, the county council had failed to develop affordable housing or lay out new streets - contrary to one of the key recommendations of an older plan for Dingle, drawn up in the early 1990s by architects Murray O'Laoire.
Mr Brosnan, who runs the Leach a Ré book and craft shop, recalled that the Murray O'Laoire plan had been developed after extensive local consultation and "adopted with great fanfare by Kerry County Council" - before it was "quietly shelved". None of its recommendations, "from small but important issues like maintaining the regularity of window shapes along a street, to large proposals like the planning of new streets", had been implemented by the county council.
This turnabout happened in the wake of a successful appeal to An Bord Pleanála in 1994 by the Dingle Citizens' Group against plans to develop a hotel and shopping centre on the prominently located boatyard site beside the harbour. "We used the Murray O'Laoire plan to argue our case, and we won," Mr Brosnan said. "The county council has a compulsory purchase order on the site now and we'd like to see it developed as a public amenity area or possibly an arts centre." He called on the council to clarify the function of the latest local area plan for Dingle and, in particular, "whether the planning authorities themselves will pay any attention to it" by committing themselves to enforcing its development guidelines.
"We take the view that a town plan's basic purpose is to maintain the character and integrity of the place, foster the local community and guide future development," he said. But what Dingle had witnessed was the "piecemeal destruction" of its fabric.
