The recent call made by elected members of Leitrim County Council for Government assistance in dealing with the county’s vacant housing situation would be comical if it weren’t so serious.

Of the 22 elected members of Leitrim County Council, 17 of them have held their seats for over 10 years, and Of the remaining 5, 2 have held their seats for over 5 years.

As is the case all over the country, these Councillors regualarly disclaim responsibility for their actions by insisting that power at Local Authority level rests with the County Manager and not with them. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of planning law knows that this is complete nonsense.

County Councillors have 2 key powers: they get to set commercials rates, and they get write Development Plans.

A Development Plan is written for every county every 6 years, and serves as the guidebook for planners in their decisions to grant or refuse permission for individual planning applications. If a Development Plan tells a planner that a particular area is zoned for residential development, the planner is required to look favourably on proposals for residential development in that area.

The formulation of Development Plans is a power that rests solely with the elected members of a County Council.

The last 3 Development Plans that have been produced by the elected members of Leitrim County Council have been blueprints for developer led chaos, so much so, that had all the land they zoned for residential development been used for residential development, Leitrim today would have a population of approx. 80,000 people.

What is worse is that even when is was abundantly clear that Leitrim was already oversupplied with housing (the 2002 census showed that approx. 24% of houses in Leitrim were unoccupied on a permanent basis), these same Councillors went ahead a zoned even more land for residential development in the 2002-2008 Development Plan.

In fact, the message still hadn’t sunk in after the 2007 Census (the 2007 census showed that 29% of houses in Leitrim were unoccupied on a permanent basis, although this finding was never actually discussed at a Council meeting), and when the Councillors came to write the 2009-2015 Development, not only did they remove a section inserted by the County Manager that aimed to incentivise use of the existing housing stock, they all included a call on the Minister for Finance to further extend the housing related tax breaks that had contributed to the over supply of housing in the first place.

The madness didn’t end there, however. Leitrim County Councillors also took it upon themselves to silence An Bord Pleanala, the national planning appeals agency, who had on a number of occasions overtuned decisions my by the Council’s planners in relation to specific developments.

In February 2006, after An Bord Pleanala overturned a decision to grant permission for 39 houses in the tiny village of Rossinver, Leitrim County Council voted unanimously for a motion of ‘No Confidence’ in An Bord Pleanala.

Unsurprisingly, nobody paid very much attention to this, so the next time An Bord Pleanala provoked their ire, in May 2008, the Councillors went one step further and voted (unanimoulsy again) to abolish An Bord Pleanala.

This is the sort of childish nonsense that has characterised the execution of perhaps the primary responsibility of elected members of Local Authorities, to provide for sustainable, long term development of communities which they represent.

No independent analysis of what has happened in Leitrim over the last 10 years could conclude that any forethought has gone into the planning of Leitrim’s communities, or that the people who were charged with that responsibility had the faintest idea what they were doing.

Instead, we are left with a huge oversupply of housing, a local construction sector that won’t recover for at least a decade, and an unfinished housing estate problem that will consume the Council’s scarce resources for years to come.

The Councillors recent call for Government assistance is an admission of same.