Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I think the Minister of State indicated in his response to the amendment that the promotion of culture, cultural space and infrastructure was a matter of policy rather than planning.

I strongly disagree with him on that. I will give a concrete example I came upon when I was given a fantastic tour in the last week of the emerging Cherrywood development in our area. The town centre is critical to the whole development being sustainable as it was originally envisaged. The intention was that it would not repeat the mistakes of the past, where loads of residential properties were built without proper infrastructure and services. This town centre element is now in peril. The developers have decided that this part of the development is not viable for them. The heart of what would make it a sustainable development could be in peril. I met some residents a week or two ago who have very much bought in to the place precisely because they saw it as a sustainable community plan as that was the vision for it. Now that there is a review taking place, they are worried that the amenities, facilities and cultural spaces they imagined would be provided might now be in peril.

Even from an environmental point of view this is an issue because one of the features of the development is that people would not have to travel to do things. People would not have to go elsewhere for entertainment and cultural activities because it would all be there. Now, the residents are seriously worried that it may not be there and they will have to get in their cars again in order to go to the theatre or to a concert. To my mind, this is a big problem because it defeats one of the central purposes of what was imagined for this development. We have to do everything - go over and above, so to speak - to ensure the imperative that in any development, cultural spaces are an absolute requirement, not an optional extra. They have to be there because otherwise we are not talking about sustainable communities.

I want to make one other brief point. For a country whose reputation is built on arts and culture, it is extraordinary that at almost every level arts and culture are the poor relation in terms of political priorities. We punch so far above our weight in terms of the creative pool of talent we have in this country for poetry, music, acting and theatre. Our reputation on a global scale is very centrally associated with these activities but our infrastructure and support for them rank among the worst in Europe. For example, in Germany, every little town has a theatre with full-time staff employed. Here we have pop-up arts and culture that is often dependent on whether the artist can find a pub to perform in, which may then be knocked down by a developer, as was threatened in the case of The Cobblestone. The idea that we would hardwire in the requirement and imperative of having cultural spaces as part of developments seems to me to be absolutely necessary, rather than just reasonable, at so many levels. I strongly ask the Minister of State to consider this amendment bearing those points in mind.