Planners must heed the Government's determination to have more one-off rural housing, but they should not allow them to be built on the side of the road, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Éamon Ó Cuív has declared.
Speaking to the Patrick MacGill Summer School, Mr Ó Cuív said the Government has set the objective that rural communities should be developed and that rural population numbers should rise.
"We need the recognition by all organs of the State of their role in ensuring the democratic will of the people as expressed through their Government is achieved.
"This is something that our physical planners are going to have to become more sensible about," he said.
"I am not questioning the professional integrity of our planners but I do have to question the mindset within which they operate," he added, during a debate on rural life.
"Some planners can only see, and I don't know where it is coming from, a hierarchy of cities, gateways, hubs, towns, villages and the rest.
"We must see in rural Ireland a totally different hierarchy and the dispersed communities where not everything focuses around hubs and gateways and everything else."
However, planning rules practised by Galway County Council, for example, which have allowed widespread and much-criticised ribbon development should be discouraged.
"I had endless, endless rows with Galway County Council. They have destroyed, and this is the irony of it, the landscape of rural Ireland and at the same time resisted allowing people live in rural Ireland.
"How they have done it is by their absolute insistence on road frontage, and the dragging of people down on to the main roads, on to the tourist roads, instead of "losing" our houses in the folds and the hollows, the hills of Ireland, where you could have lost twice as many houses, preserved our landscape and at the same time preserved our rural population," said Mr Ó Cuív.
"What I think we have done, foolishly, is to adopt European thinking, which is based on a very different history, culture and, importantly, climate. With a bit of imagination, we can meet both objectives."
Rural people are attached, firstly, to the townland and the parish: "The planners totally ignore that order of priorities. It is absolutely foolhardy to ignore this particular hierarchy of place, as opposed to the conventional one that sees it as cities downward.
"There is no point in talking about preserving the heritage of the countryside, about preserving the culture, the language, the music. None of that is preservable without preserving the people. It is just not doable," he declared.
Meanwhile, An Post's chief executive, Donal Connell, said the closure of nearly 400 post and sub-post offices since 2000 had not "been planned or structured" by the company. He said the closures came because post office contractors faced "enormous difficulties" caused by changing demographics and consumer habits.
"Increased use of cars to access large centres for shopping has taken its toll on villages and rural communities throughout Ireland and An Post is by no means the only one to suffer," he said.
A "detailed review of the network" will be carried out later this year to identify "the optimum configuration" of post offices, "taking into account the needs of our customers". The rapid changes have "not been conducive to the efficient running of the business" in rural areas.
