Country strolls under threat of poorly signalled development plans

This is the time of year when people more disciplined than me work off a hefty festive lunch by going for a walk in the country. And in most small towns you don’t have to go that far to get there; in many, you don’t have to get in the car to go for a walk – that paradox of the contemporary cult of fitness.

So it is in Arklow: you can walk to the beaches or to the woody area known as Glenart Wood. And to get to Glenart, which is managed by Coillte, you go on a path bounded by fields and the start of the woods to the bridge over the M11 and then down the other side to a little wooden bridge over a stream. Once you could do a loop back to the town after that from the road by the castle, but there’s too much traffic now and it’s dangerous.

At least that’s what it was like. I have been going on this walk my entire life – it was what you did on a Sunday afternoon – but when I went the other day, I found myself in an alien landscape. What had been fields with two horses who came over to visitors to check them out is now an enormous building site which bounds the path on both sides. It’s hideous; stretches of mud and bulldozers with new buildings marked out on the ground. And it’s huge, stretching down to the road far below.

And the effect is to contract the world. Once, getting this far meant you were pretty well in the country; you’d left the town behind you. Now, the path between the fields has turned into the back of a housing estate and you have gone from one built environment to another. There will remain a walk but it’s being swallowed up by housing . . . what you were trying to get away from. A common amenity that every family in the town will have taken for granted is, all of a sudden, disappearing.

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Proposed scale

How did it happen? The first that some people living nearby knew about it was when the bulldozers moved in. How could nearly everyone be taken unawares by the rezoning of what we’d all taken for granted?

There is no suggestion that there was anything improper about the process. There was indeed a planning notice next to the fields – difficult to read, because of condensation – and there were plans for interested individuals to consult in the county council in Wicklow, but neither gave any idea to normal people of the scale of what was proposed. There was also, I found, a description of the scheme on PlanningAlerts.ie (check out this useful resource) where I found the area I knew is now called Heatherside Yardland – it was neither a moor nor a yard previously – and a planning application was submitted a year ago with a two-month period for consultation of which everyone I spoke to was entirely unaware.

And that’s the problem. It is, moreover, a problem that goes way beyond this particular development, for every parish in Ireland. When a planning application is made that affects the common life of a community – and this walk very much does – and which has an impact far wider than the people living right next to it and which will permanently affect the quality of life of an entire town, and is irreversible, then the usual process isn’t good enough. What is needed is for the consultation to be brought to the people.

Public meeting

In old-tech terms, this means putting a prominent notice in the local newspaper. It means putting pictures of the proposals in a setting where people can actually see them, with images of the area now and of what the scheme would look like. In the parish centre, for instance. It means holding a public meeting – or if Covid-19 doesn’t allow this, then the social media equivalent. There are umpteen local Facebook groups which could be used to disseminate the plans. Then, and only then, would permission be given to go ahead – or not. It’s worth mentioning that there is already a ghost development from the last building boom, not far from this one, almost entirely unused.

This is ultimately a problem of political accountability. Planners have unlimited means and knowledgeable lawyers; the demand for housing within commuting distance of Dublin is endless; and local representatives – an unimpressive breed – do not have the imaginative capability to translate cant like “environment” and “sustainability” into simple things like a walk in the woods.

Meanwhile, can someone stop what’s happening to the fields and woods where we walk? Please.

Melanie McDonagh is from Arklow and writer at large for the Evening Standard