An Bord Pleanála has refused planning permission for a bungalow less than 100 metres from Thoor Ballylee, near Gort, Co Galway, saying it would compromise the setting of W.B. Yeats's former home.
Overturning a decision by Galway County Council to approve the scheme, the board said the proposed house would "seriously detract from the literary interest, character, heritage value and setting" of this recorded national monument.
It would also materially contravene the council's own objective, as set out in its 1997 county plan, to restrict inappropriate development in the immediate environs of heritage areas of archaeological, historical, architectural and artistic interest.
Describing Thoor Ballylee as "a building of significant cultural and heritage importance" because of its association with Yeats, it said the erection of a house in close proximity would also damage important views from the roof of the tower.
"The proposed development would be visually intrusive in views from Thoor Ballylee and would materially and adversely affect the character, heritage value and setting" of the building, designated as a protected structure in the draft county plan.
The applicant, Mr Paddy Fahy, had sought permission to construct a house with a floor area of 138 sq metres and a septic tank just over 60 metres from the 16th-century tower. He claimed it was the only site with road frontage which was not liable to flooding.
Although Dúchas, the Heritage Service, had no objection and the scheme was supported by Mr Noel Treacy TD, an appeal was lodged by Ms Linda O'Connell Satchwell, a Yeats scholar, with the support of An Taisce and the Irish Georgian Society.
She noted that much of Yeats's most revered volume of poetry, The Tower, was written at Thoor Ballylee in 1928. A plaque recorded: "I the poet William Yeats/With old millboards and seagreen slates/And smithy-work from the Gort forge/Restored this tower. . ."
At an oral hearing in Galway on February 25th, Yeats's biographer, Prof Roy Foster, of Oxford University, said the erection of "a glaring new house on an elevated site less than a hundred metres away would be an appalling intrusion into a landscape".
Mr Dermot Kelly, the planning inspector who conducted the hearing, agreed with Prof Foster and the objectors and recommended that permission be refused because the proposed house would be visually intrusive and contrary to proper planning.