Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The actions of this Government suggest it does not believe a word of it either. It is all just spin and talk. It is not real.

I wish to make a third point about going back to the people and doing it from the bottom up. Where is the bottom up? There are three regional assemblies. If the Department projections are true, my regional assembly will be an assembly of 3 million people. I do not see it working. If we were serious about a bottom-up approach in Dublin, we would say we want a mayor for Dublin. That would enable us to stop planning the chaos that has been created by the lack of proper planning in this city. Instead, we could start thinking about where we put housing.

Similarly, we need to look at the key missing ingredient, which is how to lift our smallest towns. I would look for us to be putting back in district councils. They were taken out by Phil Hogan because it was popular at the time. The view was that politics was back and getting rid of politicians was a good idea. I think that was a fatal mistake. Where is the plan for strengthening regional government that would allow towns to indicate how they believe they are going to meet the objectives of reducing sprawl and cutting out carbon? I do not see any empowerment of the political process. I do not believe that the current regional assembly system is sufficiently robust, strong or relevant. The only area where it is relevant is the national land use plan. There is a plan to divide the country between the north and west and between the south and east. It does not relate to Dublin or the east midlands, but in the area of land use, farming and forestry, perhaps that makes sense. In any case, there is nothing about it in this plan. There is nothing about a national land use plan that might back up a spatial plan.

I am positive and supportive of the idea, but the reason I brought back in the budget is because if we were serious about this we would have seen something in the budget. I see nothing in the budget to back this up and, therefore, I do not believe it is real. That is a valid criticism.