Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is a valid and interesting concept. As politicians, I think that we would all agree with it. When I was a Minister, I had a policy of never refusing a delegation from anyone and I went off and met the delegations as opposed to them coming to me. I agree with Dr. Hughes that there is a very serious role in that regard. However, one could say that us Teachtaí Dála from rural Ireland do that three days a week up here and three days a week in our constituencies. We do not have to be here seven days a week. For example, many of us would admit that we do not spend all that much time in our constituency offices - if they are away from here - because a great deal of what we do involves being out and about. However, we maintain a fantastic relationship with our staff by meeting them every week and sitting down with them, but not all day every day. We do the rest by this - I know it annoys people when they are misused - and by Internet, telephone and in a million other ways. I am wondering if this has been modelled in.

What seems to be happening quite frequently is that Eir does all the houses and then stops. I suddenly get a whole lot of frantic calls from people saying they are working from home three days a week, living out the country, and that they nearly got the Gbit but did not quite get it.

Has anyone modelled an Ireland that accommodates what is very likely to happen, which is that people come to a city two or three days a week to do the little coffee shop gig, the meetings and the conferences, and do the rest in peace and quiet where they can get on with the work in a more secluded location? Has Dr. Hughes modelled all this? Life has a funny habit of beating people such as the witnesses with their plans because the people move ahead of them. It seems to be happening. I certainly know from my experience that if I want to get away from it all and avoid meetings for a day to catch up with the paperwork and do the e-mails and the phone calls, the best place for me to be is sitting in my home in Corr na Móna, because then people only come to me on Saturday morning at the right time and I can get on with the job. Has anyone done a model that asks what if the future is not the simple model the witnesses are putting forward here today? What if the future is that we live on an island that is the size of the footprint of many American cities when their recreational areas are taken into account, for example, New York, New Jersey and upstate Connecticut or wherever they all go for the weekend. Should we not model that rather than this 20th century view that seems to be predominant in public thinking at the moment that everyone has to come in at eight o'clock every morning and be in work at nine o'clock, clogging every street? We are actually going to have many people working at home, coming in at ten o'clock or 10.30 two days a week and not having to travel up to the city. In that way we could relieve a lot of the traffic and people would live in a much more salubrious manner.

My second question concerns those who come from the nice comfortable middle classes and move into the city. More rural people get a good education per 100,000 than urban people, so these are our biggest resource in generating all this great growth and foreign interest and so on. The big growth has been the high-performing rural areas which, per 100,000 population, get more into the top end than the whole of Dublin city. By not growing the countryside, particularly the non-urban countryside, are we not in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg? What if that supply dries up some time in the future?

Anyone who watches hurling or football teams will see this crazy phenomenon. Anyone who went to see the Cork hurling team last Sunday, who had a fantastic achievement, should take the population of Cork city and its environs, what Dr. Hughes call the dominated area of Cork, as the total population of the hurling playing part of the county, so we can count out west Cork, and see how many of the people who came from urban areas and from the city made the team compared with how many from rural areas. They will ask if there is something happening here that defies logic. Has that factor been included?

How does Dr. Hughes deal with the fact contained in this model that as we grow cities, we grow the RAPID areas of this country, defined by Trutz Haase as areas high in deprivation? I do not care what statistics show. Try asking rural people if they would swap where they are living. Does the committee know where Ballycroy is? One night in Ballycroy I had approximately 300 people in a hall, which would be one for every two that live in the place, and I offered to put any one of them up in any RAPID area of my choice for a week at my expense. I did not get one taker. If it was really so attractive, why were they not queuing up at the end of the hall? That is because they would have dreaded to go where I was going to send them. My question is how do we create cities without creating these RAPID areas that account for so much of the rim of Dublin city around the M50? These are economically non-generative, they are destroying huge resources and they are places where people have more drugs than jobs, unfortunately, and I am not blaming the fabulous people who live there. How does Dr. Hughes deal with that?

The programme for Government states, "We also recognise that as the economy recovers it is essential that the new Government, together with the Oireachtas, puts in place measures to revitalise all of Ireland so that the benefits are felt inside every doorstep and in every community." Is that not at odds with the direction that Dr. Hughes and Mr. Moran are pushing things? They are saying that is poppycock, that we cannot get to every doorstep, and that we have to concentrate the development in the growing areas for the benefit of an economy, whatever that is.