Mr. Henk van der Kamp:

Deputy Ó Broin mentioned that an over-concentration of population in Dublin is bad. Unplanned over-concentration in Dublin is bad but a planned concentration of population in Dublin may not be bad and this is one of the key questions that the national planning framework has to address. It would be a very interesting question to address it in social media, in community discussion and an even more interesting question to get the debate going might be that the national planning framework will make a radical change to one-off housing. That will get many people talking about our national policies. Spatial planning is a creative discipline.

The national planning framework is about a picture of Ireland in the future. Everybody should have a say in that. That makes it interesting. Deputy Ó Broin asked why the national spatial strategy, NSS, did not work. We can say it has worked in many way. I agree with Mr. Niall Cussen that the context it has provided has been very useful. One of the reasons it may not have worked is that it tried to do too much. It is back to the question of the social and economic disparities. Perhaps we cannot do a great deal about that in terms of the geographic location, certainly in terms of settlement patterns or major employment concentrations. Trying to disperse employment into eight gateway towns and even more hub towns clearly has not worked. The biggest mistake that the NPF could make would be to revisit that and to repeat it, even in a smaller number of centres. That would be a high risk strategy.

I think the scenario based approach would allow different models to be tested, including a radical overhaul of one-off housing, but also including concentration in Dublin as a realistic possibility for a national planning framework. Why do I say that? Ireland is not the only country that is suffering population decline in regions within successful economically performing countries. Almost every western European country has the same problem at the moment. While the cities are growing the rural regions are declining. We call it shrinking population. This is widespread. The projections are that the cities will grow further. We do not have many mega cities in Europe, but there are many mega cities in the world and these seem to be growing even faster. The idea that we have to disperse development across the island is a very important question for the national planning framework. In our submission we suggested that this can be done by scenario based approach, which would also help the community engagement.

Let me finish on another point that we raised in our submission, that is, that the national planning framework, unlike the national spatial strategy should not just be about population settlements or distribution. The national spatial strategy was to a large extent and perhaps had to be about that, but there is an opportunity now with the White Paper on energy to be proactive on the energy side and perhaps make energy more important than population settlement for the next generation because that is where the major challenge is and also where the significant opportunities are, ironically for the rural areas of Ireland. If I can make one case today, it would be an argument for the energy potential of the regions outside Dublin.