Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to catch up with where we are on most of these issues. Deputy Casey is of course speaking from a County Wicklow perspective. We have had a similar situation in County Meath so I can understand the logic behind his questions. Following on from last night's debate, I believe that the plan we are discussing here provides the answer to most of the Deputy's questions if we can only stick to it. The Deputy is right to say that many people in this country have bought into plans over the years without ever seeing them happen. This is why we need follow-through and why this is a 20 to 25 year plan. All of the State agencies, working groups and Departments have been feeding into this plan over recent years and everybody has been asked to play their part. As we have seen, we get more action and delivery when everybody buys in. We have seen this with the housing plan, the jobs plan and the rural action plan. This is how we are now doing business across Government and it is an approach that works and delivers more. It is also a matter of backing up this plan.

A 20 to 25 year plan like this one cannot provide all the tiny details that we might want it to. It has to set out the overall strategy, the overall vision, and the long-term approach as to where we want to go as a country. We have to get acceptance of and buy-in to this. We will then build out regional, local and even town and village plans. If we do not agree on the overall concept to begin with, however, we cannot put the rest of the plans in place. We will also be looking at this as we develop the ten-year capital strategy in the weeks and months ahead, and our departmental officials will be working together with other Departments to examine the vision in this. The ten-year plan will then of course match up some of the infrastructural requirements and direct our investment.

A question was asked about Irish Water. The section in this plan on rural towns and villages, pages 66, 67 and 68, states that we want to give people the choice of living in a rural area. This means that they have the choice to build in the small town or village servicing that rural area. It does not mean that everybody has to have a one-off house out on the open fields. We have to give people the option of living in the village or town a mile up the road, complete with services and with sites delivered at an affordable price. It is not always possible to service all of the one-off houses. It is true that certain people have to live there out of economic need. Being a rural person myself, I also understand that some people also have a social need to live there and this has to be catered for. It is more important, however, that people have the option to be able to live in the local town or village. This needs direct investment from Irish Water and this is exactly what this plan is about.

I see Ireland 2040 as setting out our business case and our plan for investment. Coming back to Deputy Barry's comments about investing in public infrastructure, we will not get investment in public transport if we do not have a business plan for having more people living in the cities to make investment in public infrastructure more economical and worthwhile. This plan is all about directing and filling up our cities, moving into brownfield sites and putting in the critical mass needed for really top-class public transport. This in turn will make it easier to win investment and to make a business case. I see some people here from Galway. We had a discussion with the local authorities in Galway on the fact that we need to invest hundreds of millions of euro in infrastructure if we really want to make Galway a successful city that can compete internationally in the future. This will also generate an increased population that will use and pay for that infrastructure. This plan is about trying to drive this kind of thinking.

Another member mentioned the skills shortage in education. Much of this plan has been drawn up in consultation with the Department of Education and Skills with particular focus on questions such as where the choice is in education, where we are going with education, and where is the access to education. People in the regions feel that they have suffered over the years because they have not had the same access to education as others. This comes down to the cost of living in the city. Through the national skills strategy and the local skills fora, we have come to recognise that any move to address the shortage in skills and in education has to be at regional and local level. Our local authorities and local enterprise offices, LEOs, have to engage with the education players through the skills fora at a county level. The national skills strategy goes out to 2020 and we have factored into it the need for at least 60,000 new apprenticeships and traineeships. This has been reflected in the recent budget, thankfully, which put increased money into apprenticeships, traineeships, on-the-job training and working with education and training boards and institutes of technology. Given what was going on with the storm, the announcement on Monday of an extra €200 million investment for the IT sector and infrastructure may have been missed. This recognises the role played by the ITs in servicing the regions.

This comes back again to driving an economic purpose for all towns, villages and counties outside of the cities. We are very conscious of the fact that we will only drive this economic purpose if we have the education to match. The question is absolutely on the ball. We need to match our skills around the country, and this is what we are doing though the national skills strategy. This, again, is a long-term strategy that needs to be both followed and backed up. This is exactly what the Government has been doing and announcing the money for that recently. We need to make sure that we are producing the skills that we need, not just at university level, but at all different levels: apprenticeships, traineeships and on-the-job-training. We have an obsession with universities in this country but they are just one part of the combination. We often hear conversations about certain individuals taking on apprenticeships because they could not go the route of higher education, but this is not the way to talk about this. It is a matter of what is best for the career, not the person. Individuals might be better qualified for certain jobs if they follow the route of on-the-job training. In many cases one may be better off going through an apprenticeship because one will acquire better skills and be left more ready for a job compared with someone else who went straight on to university. We have to change the conversation on this and this particularly applies to parents and grandparents because they direct where their children end up going. We have to refocus our thinking in this regard and that is one of the objective of the national skills strategy. All these various strategies again feed into the Ireland 2040 plan and into the logic of what we are trying to do with it.

In response to a further question, it is certainly envisaged that we try to grow our towns and villages. It is right to say that about 30% to 40% of our population lives in one-off houses in rural Ireland. This is not sustainable. These people do not want to move 20 miles away, however. They want to stay in their communities. Ideally, we will build up towns and villages while at the same time clearly recognising, even under EU law, that there is still a need for some people to live in rural areas. That need is accepted and recognised in this plan. It is stated here in black and white that we will allow for it.

The regional and county development plans running until 2018 will back up the thinking behind Ireland 2040 and ensure follow-through. We have seen good plans in the past, of course, but we have never followed through on them. Under the new planning Bill coming through the Dáil, this plan will now take the form of a statutory document that will have to be renewed every few years. The Dáil has a role in this, as does the joint committee here today. There were no such roles in the previous spatial strategy in 2002. That is nobody's fault, but we have now moved on in our thinking. Ireland 2040 also sees us trying to bring sustainability and environmental measures into the planning process and closer to our thinking. This is what we are trying to achieve with this.

I return to the planning requirement raised by Deputy Casey. As the Deputy knows, the planning Bill is going through the Dáil and it covers the role of the OPR and the transport pillar. We will have the chance to discuss that at this committee in the future. We recognise that there has to be a greater link between transport and infrastructural plans and planning and that is why we are here. Transport will be a key part of the three-year strategy and the ten-year capital plan. We want to connect the cities outside of Dublin together and we also need to invest in transport within Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and so on. If we do not do so, developing these cities will not be sustainable and people will not want to live there. If we only develop the infrastructural links between cities, there is the danger that we fail in our target to develop the cities themselves. There is a need for parallel development here both inside and between these cities.

I think I have covered all of the questions raised.