Mr. Paul Hogan:

I thank my colleague, Mr. Cussen, the Chairman, Deputies and Senators. I will speak a little bit about the Ireland 2040 process. I will run through it very quickly because I am sure members have seen the statement at this stage.

Since the national spatial strategy, NSS, was published 15 years ago, a lot has happened. There has been a lot of positive progress in terms of infrastructure, particularly transport infrastructure. More concerning is the fact that the locations which were identified as strategic growth points, in other words as "gateways" and "hubs", in that strategy were outperformed in the intervening years by many other locations and that has caused us difficulties. Nonetheless, the NSS was a very important starting point in the process in which we are now engaged. It established a more strategic and co-ordinated approach to planning and infrastructure co-ordination. The lessons learned from the NSS are a valuable resource for us in developing its successor strategy, which is why our Department commissioned an expert advisory report to independently appraise its implementation a couple of years ago. That report is available on the Ireland 2040 website and the national planning framework website.

Public consultation on Ireland 2040 kicked off on 2 February. It was launched by An Taoiseach and the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, at Maynooth University. As part of the process, we had an Ireland 2040 issues and choices paper that outlined key areas for consideration in planning for Ireland’s future including a section devoted to the potential of rural areas. We also engaged in a large number of consultation events throughout the country with the Minister and, independently, with local councillors. Further to the consultation process, we received more than 3,000 submissions before the deadline at the end of March. Many of those were specific to Ireland 2040. Also informing the preparation of the framework is a statistical, demographic and econometric model report prepared by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, which projects population and employment data for a number of different scenarios into the future. That aligns with the latest 2016 census data. In terms of legislative compliance, we also need to prepare a strategic environmental assessment, a strategic flood risk assessment and screening for habitats directive assessment as part of this process. We have to do all of those things.

In Ireland, we have the good fortune of being able to plan for the progression of our country in terms of economic and demographic growth and social development and the environment. Over the next 20 years, our country is likely to grow in population terms by at least 1 million. There will be approximately two thirds of a million people at work and we will need at least 500,000 more homes to be provided. We are very different from many of our European neighbours in this regard because of our still-young population and the agility of our economy in adjusting to various economic shocks and opportunities. Ireland punches way above its weight, as do some of our cities and their wider regions, notably Dublin which, as our capital city, puts the country on the global map, particularly from a foreign direct investment perspective.

There are some key questions for the national planning framework, NPF. Where should people live and work? How can we best ensure a high quality of life and environment and the delivery of the kind of physical and social infrastructure that is needed to sustain progress for all our people? The population of Ireland in April 2016 was just over 4.76 million people. As regards the proportion of the national population residing in rural Ireland, the CSO regards rural areas as those outside settlements with inhabitants of 1,500 or more people and, in those terms, we have a population that is 63% urban and 37% rural. Some 1.75 million people are thus defined as rural. If the threshold is raised to include those towns with a population of 10,000 people, almost half of Ireland’s population would be considered to live in rural areas. That metric is more useful for the integrated planning we need to do and it enables us to look at urban and rural issues together to reflect the complementary nature of their roles and functions.

In overall terms, rural parts of Ireland outside census towns experienced quite high levels of national population growth between 1996 and 2016. This level of growth was almost unique in Europe, where the trend has generally been that rural populations have declined, especially where located outside the catchments of large cities. Map 1.1 in our presentation illustrates the contrast between the growing parts of our country, in red and brighter colours, and declining parts of our country, in grey and darker colours. While a growing population and a fast-developing country in some parts are a plus from a strategic planning perspective, the way in which our larger cities and towns have been growing fastest at their edges, while in many cases city and town centres are in population decline, is presenting many infrastructural, investment, social and environmental challenges. At the same time, the data highlight a contrast between a growing population in many, but not all countryside areas, while ever-higher vacancy rates of housing and other premises are being experienced in smaller towns and villages. Many of our major cities and towns are growing fastest at their outward limits, placing overspilling residential development pressures on smaller rural towns and villages that, at times, are struggling to cope with the influx of such development. Once one moves further out into remoter and more rural communities, it is the smaller towns and villages that appear to experience higher levels of vacancy and underutilisation of their built environment, leading to the familiar spiral of loss of services and depopulation. The challenge we face is that the continuation of these trends into the future might well undo much of the progress of recent decades. We need a new way forward.