Rural Housing

• It should be an objective of this plan to carry out a full up to date survey of every town, village and settlement assessing the levels of vacant buildings/properties in each.

• More work needs to be done to inform members of the public what exactly is available to them in terms of supports for refurbishing vacant properties and the planning implications of doing so. In this vain, it should be an objective of this plan to hold an information evening every 12 months for the lifetime of this plan in each LEA aimed at informing vacant property owners of what is available to them.

• It should be an objective of this plan to develop a master plan for the town of Castleisland. The town needs a plan to develop the flow of traffic, public realm spaces and improve the town centre through urban design measures. This will in turn help us as a local authority to access capital funding to develop areas of the town.

• Further clarity needs to be provided in the plan as to have KCDP 4-32 will be done ? For example Repair and Lease has been in place for many years now and in my opinion is not fit for purpose. Take up has been very slow on this scheme and what can this council do to encourage it further than it already has ?

• KCDP 4-34 I agree with, but, in terms of “identifiable address” can this be further clarified.

• A licensing system for the operation of mobile catering/coffee units should be established for those wishing to operate on publicly owned land. I cannot state enough that of course we must protect the rate payers in our town, but, that does not mean we cannot have such a system in place. For example, a fantastic job has been done at the Glounsharoon Viewing Point, we should have a system in place that allows someone to operate a Coffee Stand there for the summer months. This would pose no threat to businesses in the town of Castleisland, in fact, it could help, because it will assist in getting people to stop, take in the beautiful views and identify Castleisland as a place to visit which they may have otherwise bypassed. By having a licensing system in place you can control what type of business will operate in that area bearing in  mind the existing rate payer. Another example would be in Brosna, there is no chipper there, but why couldn’t the council have a system whereby a mobile unit could come to the KCC owned car park of a Friday and Saturday night and trade there ? I believe this only makes sense especially post Covid where this sort of trading is growing in popularity. Of course these businesses should be charged for the use of the space perhaps on a monthly basis which would be added income for the council also.

• It should be an objective of this plan that the Riverwalk in Castleisland would be taken in charge by Kerry County Council.

• It should be an objective of this plan to identify suitable areas for warehousing. With the ever increasing demand of online shopping we should be looking at attracting distribution/storage centres in areas with good transport links throughout the county.

• Under 6.2.3 ‘Housing for Sustainable Communities” housing for elderly/venerable in the form of 1-2 bedroom houses would be built in a community type fashion, for example like Tobar Naofa, Tralee and Taobh Linn, Kenmare with all the ancillary services available to them. This should be an objective of the plan.

• The Kerry Hub & Knowledge Triangle should not stifle development in other regional towns from growing, places such as Castleisland, Farranfore and North Kerry for example.
• The ability to work from home/remotely is going to be extremely important over the lifetime of this plan. Kerry will benefit massively from people relocating to the county due to remote working and this plan should take full cognises of that.

Within the CFRAMs study areas have been identified in that as being flood plains or areas that have flooded in the past when in fact there may have been no history of flooding on these sites yet they are effectively sterilised from any development. This should be reviewed

• Clarity needs to be provided for the ‘Areas of Further Assessment’ for wind energy zoning, it needs to be made clear that the assessments for these areas are indeed finalised and that Map 12.4 is the final product of all the councils assessments. It is easy to see how members of the public reading the plan could misinterpret the “Areas of Further Assessment” as still being a work in progress when the reality is they are not. This has led to people misinforming themselves of what is actually potentially “Open to Consideration” and an additional paragraph relating to this should be included to clear up any confusion.

• A setback distance of 6 times the blade tip height from the curtilage of any residential property should be imposed on the development of wind turbines.

• In relation to repowering, wind farms that are less than 8 years old should not be zoned for repowering.

• Further clarity needs to be provided on repowering, is this a national directive that wind areas need to be repowered, if so please state where this is ?

• A buffer zone of 2 KMs should be put in place near any SAC/SPC in order to protect our wildlife and habitats. 500m is far from adequate.

• I am proposing that Planning Permission for Battery Storage Units should not be granted in Kerry until such time that Planning Guidelines are put in place for their development.

• I am requesting that the Chief Fire Officer sets out in this plan how the fire service in Kerry will deal with an emergency such as a fire, what training/equipment the fire service in Kerry have in dealing with Lithium Battery fires of this scale.

• That it would be a requirement of a planning application for any large scale renewable energy project to distribute an information pack outlining the proposed development to every address within 10KM of the development site.

• That Kerry County Council would support the development of an LNG Terminal in the Ballylongford/Tarbert landbank.