Housing Conflicts in the Irish Countryside: Uses and Abuses of Postcolonial Narratives

The aim of this paper is to explore how collective memories of place have framed contemporary planning conflicts in a rural arena. Specifically, the paper charts the emergence of the Irish Rural Dwellers Association (IRDA) as a vocal campaigner for private property rights and a laissez-faire approach to accommodating new housing development in the open countryside. For the IRDA, postcolonial narratives and national(ist) identities provide an important vocabulary for protest and opposition to state regulation by: 1) providing a discursive device to create a shared storyline of rural struggle; 2) providing an exclusionary device, whereby drawing on ‘memory’ and representations of rurality creates an insider/outsider discourse where some voices are cast as illegitimate; and 3) providing a frame for placing emotional knowledge at the centre of planning and landscape policy-making. This paper questions the authenticity of this policy narrative and addresses the validity of self-acclaimed knowledge within the landscape and rural policy arena. More broadly, the paper attempts to enhance understanding of how memory shapes policy narratives in the (re)production of cultural landscapes.