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

I am very worried that we are going to get a spatial strategy that does not take the most important component into account, namely people. With the Department's last "put them all in Dublin" strategy ten or 15 years ago, I predicted what I call the "melting ice cream effect". In other words, the design of the Department was for everyone to live in concentrated city centres. It would all be like an ice cream block and cut off fresh and solid. However, the problem was that the naughty people had a different idea. A lot of them came from Meath and they wanted to live there. They wanted to live in that terrible thing, the one-off house. Imagine that. Just think about it, but they did. They could not be stopped from doing what they wanted to do because we do not live in a dictatorship. The grand plan fell and the ice cream melted all over the place. It has nearly melted as far as the Shannon now. I see the same phenomenon in Galway. Some 55% to 60% of those who work in the high-end factories in Galway actually live in rural areas. If I go to Westside and a few other places, I find very few people who work at the high end jobs. The people are naughty because they do not do what the planners want. However, the planners have no legal instrument to make it happen unless they ban one-off houses and assert that they will determine where people live and that is it, going the whole hog with their plan. There is nothing worse than a plan where the instruments to implement it do not exist. One gets a totally different effect in that case.

Having grown up in this city in a household that always had a car, even though we used to bus it or use our bicycles quite a bit, I do not believe on foot of all the patterns the NTA shows that people will not continue to use private personal vehicles. I do not mean cars because "car" connotes an internal combustion engine. A private personal vehicle can be driven totally sustainably with sustainable fuels which have no carbon effect. They are on the way. We could have them now if we just put our minds to it, but we are too lazy. The idea that everyone in this lovely wet climate will go on foot or by bicycle, including the lame, the weak and the blind, is wide of the mark. I could just get rid of my internal combustion engine if we just made the electric car a real thing. However, I find that while cars are not much of a nuisance down the country, they are damnable things around cities where they get clogged up. As such, we have a lot of funny premises in this debate.

I was very interested in what was said about towns and one-off houses. The witness was absolutely right in the analysis that there is very little relationship nowadays between the vibrancy of a town and the total population. I know a good-enough sized town which has perhaps tripled in size in the last ten years, but the shopkeepers there tell us the business in the centre has absolutely decayed. They say that 80% of the shopping done in drapery stores is done by the rural rather than the urban population. Why is that? It is because in that town, the parents buy the children's clothes in Dunnes rather than in the local drapery shop. The shops that are doing well in this particular town are the two major supermarkets to which one can drive. The high street stores are disappearing. There are three convenience shops in that town doing extraordinarily well and each of them is in a service station. It is very handy. One just drives in. If one does not need fuel one can still drive in, get one's things and drive off. I suggest the Department gets some PhD student to remodel the town from memory as a project to ask what was there circa 1970 or whatever its heyday was. It would show if this premises was a shop, this one was a pub and this was a grocery. Do people remember video shops? Nobody goes to a video shop now because of Netflix. How many people go to small pubs anymore? Unless they are eateries, the answer is not too many. They sit beside the television on a big lounge chair, which they can do at home. How many people go to travel agents? I was stunned to hear that somebody had gone to one recently. Everyone who gets on to my office about passports have done the whole thing online. We know when we get the evidence of travel. The travel agent is gone.

There are a lot of complex factors in relation to towns. One can argue now about the idea of having to have a particular locus to do a thing. We have to get it into our heads that we live in a transformed world. I asked a planner why he wanted me to live in the village and he said it was so I could walk to the post office. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out my best friend. I said, "Here is my post office. Here is my bank, my travel agent and ten or 15 other things". People in rural Ireland must be the most technologically literate crowd because we do not move to do most of those things. We just do them on the net.