Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Boyhan for his contribution. A lot of work has been put into this. A Government decision was made at the end of 2014 to move to this new national planning framework and officials in the Department have been doing a huge amount of work on it since then. I am particularly proud of the logo because I picked it but that is about the extent of my involvement in terms of the production of the plan.

The Senator is absolutely right about engaging local authority members and the regional assemblies. I have written to each local authority. Three regional meetings will be held in due course. I intend to be at two of them, with the Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, attending the third, for this final phase of consultation. The Senator is right that it is very important that the people who are going to be implementing this plan at a regional level buy into it. This is not about central Government saying "You must do this". It is a foundation stone that speaks to principles, a vision and a strategy. It is for each regional assembly to come up with regional spatial and economic strategies which will be the next tier and from that will flow the county, city and local area plans. That is how we make sure that the vision is consistent throughout the country in terms of what we want to achieve and so it does need to have local government on board.

In terms of the timelines, we will adopt the plan this year and next year we will have the regional spatial and economic strategies. Those strategies will have a 12 year time horizon. As new county and city development plans are developed, they will work off the back of the regional spatial and economic strategies to a six year time horizon. It is very important, as we look to 2040 and what Ireland could and should look like, that we are not doing it based on what we understand the world to be today. There is no point in arriving at 2040 in an Ireland that was very well designed for 2020 or 2021. When we look to the potential and the opportunity, particularly for areas outside of our five main cities, we must consider automation, remote working, drone technology, driverless car technology, artificial intelligence and so forth. There are huge opportunities in changes to work practices and in new technologies to actually regenerate and revitalise large parts of our country that have been in decline for too long now. We need to make sure that we have that vision as part of the plan when we look ahead.