Some 750 objections have been lodged to the draft Co Donegal Development Plan since it was published last December, and the next phase of public consultation on the plan promises to be stormy. Most objections (87 per cent) concern the rural housing policy implications of establishing three landscape categories in which different degrees of protection against the impact of new development will be applied.
The public reaction demonstrates the intense pressure which the planning system is facing from the demand for new houses in general, and from applications for holiday home developments in particular.
The council's attempt to provide a framework for managing the rural landscape by controlling development is handicapped by the lack of national guidelines.
At the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties last week, a senior council planner drew attention to the need for a national landscape policy framework, within which local authorities could establish their own landscape policies, which would then sit clearly within a national system.
In her paper, Rural Landscapes and Rural Development, Ms Gaye Moynihan pointed out that at present each local authority uses its own criteria to describe and evaluate landscapes within its jurisdiction.
"Nationally, the need for a landscape policy framework, particularly some form of national recognition system for our most valuable landscapes, are increasingly recognised," she said.
The council expects to receive more than 5,000 planning applications this year - a 45 per cent increase on last year. Projecting even a modest rate of increase, the number of applications could grow to 7,381 by the year 2003 and to 9,823 by 2006.
Other activities which imply far-reaching changes in the Donegal's rural landscape include a recent rise in applications for aquaculture licences, particularly in Lough Swilly, and the National Forestry Strategy, which proposes to double the area of land in the county which is afforestated.
In addition, the Government's commitment to a programme of renewable energy has resulted in 28 applications for wind farms and turbines in Donegal since 1995. The pressure for new telecommunications structures is another factor.
However, Ms Moynihan said she believed that the changing socio-economic expectations of the rural population would prove to be one of the most significant elements shaping the rural landscape of the future.
There was now a strong expectation throughout the rural community that sons and daughters in or approaching household formation age groups would build houses for themselves on family lands.
This widespread wish to continue to live on the family farm in the local community, though unlikely to be involved in agricultural employment, would create a different pattern of residential settlement in the rural landscape, with small clusters of housing for related family members.
This might, in fact, constitute a reintroduction of the clachan pattern of dispersed rural housing clusters which existed about 150 years ago.
Rural housing would be a key element of a strategy to sustain our rural communities, Ms Moynihan commented. But the vision of our future rural landscape should also recognise that some parts of the landscape were worth passing on to future generations in a relatively unchanged way.
"A national policy framework for our landscape is a necessary precondition to assist in achieving this vision, just as a national policy framework for rural development is a necessary precondition for the role of rural housing in rural development," she said. She anticipated that in the future, at local level, there would be a more proactive approach by local authorities through partnership with other agencies, the community and the private sector.
Changes to the draft county development plan will be considered by the county council in the coming months and will again be published for a three-month public consultation process, probably in late autumn.