Even pump parish politics operates on a much higher plane that this quality of reporting. It’s as if planning was enforced on the community by a foreign state for somebody else’s benefit.
The article does not even mention the World Heritage status of Bru na Boinne, and the rationale for planning restrictions. There is no attempt to consider the importance of heritage for this and future generations as being even an equivocal consideration. Rather it reads as the local farmer versus the heritage centre and the bunch of foreigners it buses in:
"Gabriel Mullen lives in Dowth. He says that the OPW and the other authorities have a stranglehold on the area. His daughter Sarah has been trying for seven years to get planning permission to build on the site beside the family home, without success.
“They are slowly but surely killing off this area. We are being treated as second-class citizens,” he says.
Cllr Wayne Harding says the world heritage status was now toxic in its immediate environment.
“I have met farmers who cannot give their children a site for a house, and community organisations who have to meet with government officials before they apply for very minor planning applications. The villages of Duleek, Donore and Slane get no economic kickback from 230,000 visitors a year that are right on their doorstep.
…. “There is an effort to ethnically cleanse the area,” Gabriel Mullen says."
Could it be that missing Father Ted episode….
Here’s a novel idea. Build on individual house plots in the village, where your children can be near facilities, amenities and their friends, thereby preserving more land for farming, and less pollution of the land through septic-tanks. Problem solved.
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