Planning rules will be “liberalised” by the summer to allow more people to build one-off houses in rural areas, Minister for Housing James Browne has announced.

Whether or not this is a good idea, at least the Republic can consider it without arguing about British oppression. Northern Ireland was not so fortunate when it last tried to tackle the issue. Building a bungalow in your dad’s back field turned out to be a pointed political and cultural act.

In 2006, Stormont published the Draft Planning Policy Statement 14: Sustainable Development in the Countryside.

PPS14, as it was known, created a strict new presumption against one-off rural housing, but it still permitted generous exemptions. Such housing could continue to be built for farmers, farm workers and any employee of a non-agricultural business who needed to live near work. Replacement and conversion dwellings were still allowed, as were new houses between existing houses.

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There was wide scope to exploit these loopholes. In the first year the policy was in effect, two-thirds of applications for one-off rural housing were approved.

The carrot to PPS14’s stick was much easier approval for building in “settlements” – any cluster of houses named on a development plan. Many officially recognised settlements in Northern Ireland are home to just two or three dozen people.

In short, all that officials were trying to achieve was to group new housing around a decent road, a sewer pipe and hopefully a bus stop – the absolute minimum for sustainable development.

Yet even this caused all hell to break loose. The furious reaction from rural residents and community organisations left Stormont in no doubt it was treading on every Ulsterman’s God-given right to plonk a house down in the middle of nowhere, or to dream of doing so.

It did not help that devolution was suspended at the time, meaning the policy was issued under direct-rule British ministers – although work on it had begun under devolution five years before.

One Sinn Féin councillor summed up nationalist suspicions when he said PPS14 “imposes an English model of rurality on the Six Counties”.

Traditionally, it is only unionists who believe there were no towns in Ulster before the Plantation.

The GAA was particularly vocal about what it considered a threat to rural clubs. Omagh’s nationalist council challenged the policy in court for breaching the right to family life.

However, there was no orange-green split on the issue. Every unionist and nationalist party strongly condemned PPS14. Only Alliance dared to express sympathy with its aims, while still criticising its implementation.

Omagh’s council won its court case in 2007, not on human rights grounds but because PPS14 had been issued by the wrong department. That gave the newly restored Northern executive the excuse it needed to ditch the policy. DUP ministers replaced it in 2010 with a watered-down version. Councils have been watering it down further since 2023, when they began assuming more planning responsibilities. The approval rate for rural housing in many areas is over 95 per cent.

This must have contributed to Northern Ireland’s robust rural growth over the past two decades. Three-quarters of the region’s total population increase has been in rural areas, compared to a quarter in the Republic. Housing is cheaper and more available across the North, although the gap is closing for a host of reasons.

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But it is also painfully apparent that Northern Ireland has suffered unsustainable rural development. Public services have become steadily more difficult to provide to a dispersed population. So far this is most obvious in health. It is about to become stark in education, as the number of schoolchildren heads into steep decline.

Overloaded sewers are a key reason house-building in Northern Ireland has dropped to historic lows over the past decade. While this is not just a rural problem, scattered housing adds greatly to water pollution and the cost of modernising the system. Domestic septic tanks cause 15 per cent of the pollution in Lough Neagh, for example – almost a quarter of the total from agriculture.

To that extent, building one-off houses in the countryside has impeded house-building everywhere.

There is no sign of any political party in Northern Ireland reassessing its position in this light. They will be even less inclined to do so if the Republic liberalises rural house-building to address a housing shortage.

Scattering houses across the countryside is fine if society is prepared to accept the additional costs and the public-service implications. There is no sign of this in Northern Ireland either. If rural living is a fundamental part of our culture, we ought to be better at it.

The English also dream of building in the country, to an obsessional degree, but their planning system makes it almost impossible. They have imposed their model of rurality on themselves.

© The Irish Times