Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is a strong sense that spatial planning in this State is defunct, that the 2002 spatial plan was jettisoned very shortly after it was created and that there is nearly a free-for-all with regard to development. That development is creating great difficulties for places like Dublin because of overheating and difficulties involving services in Dublin. It also creates great difficulties for areas like my constituency, which is in the commuter belt, where the road is chock-a-block. It takes three hours commuting per day to get in and out of towns like Navan. There is massive flight from many towns in rural Ireland. We received a list from our previous guest listing towns like Birr, Athy and Clonmel, which have seen massive drops in different censuses of population. We know that a big change is happening, that it is not being driven in any particular direction per seand that this is an opportunity to, hopefully, fix that.

One of the most interesting submissions we heard from during this part of our investigation was Teagasc. Witnesses from Teagasc said that an interesting development was taking place. Young people who are starting families needed two incomes to survive. They need two incomes to buy a house today. They went to areas where they could access urban-type jobs. That meant that they left their more rural towns, which made a big difference in terms of changing the age profile of counties like Louth, Wicklow, Meath and Kildare and the counties on the western seaboard. The population average was increasing radically in the west and declining here because of young couples with young children in those places. It seems to me that to a certain extent, one of the greatest tools to re-balance that driving force within that demographic change is the location of jobs. If people can access two jobs in towns like Clonmel and Birr, which are losing people, they are more likely to want to stay there in the future, which will redress some of those age profiles. Jobs tend to migrate towards infrastructure. Regardless of whether it is transportation, communication or educational infrastructure, that is where most enterprises want to locate.

The NTA also appeared before us. I asked witnesses from the NTA what determines its development of infrastructure. They told me it was demand. If demand determines the location of infrastructure, the process just flows in exactly the same direction it is currently flowing so there is no change because the demand is where the development is happening at the moment and the lack of demand is where places have been emptied out. The key elements that the NPF needs to have concern how to disrupt that trend. It needs to come up with a formula that apportions investment contrary to demand in the State. Obviously, this is a very difficult thing to do because as legislators, we typically respond to demand. We must meet that demand in Dublin and other large urban areas first and foremost to a certain extent but we must prioritise areas where demand is not as great but where we want to shift future demand. What formulas can be used for policy makers to make that happen?