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

That is agreed so long as we may keep coming back until everyone has gone home and only one or two of us are left. Five minutes is not enough time to express my concerns about the thrust of where we are going.

I will briefly mention an urban problem. The plan is to grow our cities dramatically and quickly. Let us look at our cities. The areas in this State with the highest levels of deprivation and drug abuse - this is not the fault of the people living there because they are highly segregated - are all located in our cities and were all rapidly built. We have no housing in our cities. The plan is to put 45,000 more people into Galway, for example, when there is no housing there. It would be necessary to build 20,000 houses merely to catch up. If they were to be implemented today, all the transport proposals in this plan would only deal with the current situation. However, the Minister of State wants to add a further 45,000 people to the city. There are huge swathes of our country which could be developed and in which we would not face these problems but the new religion of urbanisation, which is a 20th century concept, seems to have taken over and is driving everything. There is an idea that the only successful places are cities. That is fine. Take Ballsbridge, which is in my neck of the woods. One could say that it is a relatively successful place but I cannot think of many people in Corr na Móna who would want to live in some of the less well off parts of Limerick, Galway or Dublin. We need to look at this holistically and challenge the premise behind much of what is being said here.

I have read this plan. It is very clever. It says this and that and has a little bit in it for everybody but, ultimately, the Minister of State has clearly spelled out the position here today, for which I thank him. He said, "We are working closely with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform to ensure an effective alignment between the NPF and the mid-term review of the capital plan". The plan states that the money is to be focused on the cities. The Minister of State says that the way in which money was spent previously was too dispersed. Very cleverly, the Department is now setting up this independent planning regulator which will pick this report up and say that it was told to invest the money in the cities, despite all the fine words. It can be seen all throughout the document - it is all cities and towns and the rest of us do not count. I was really impressed by Senator Mulherin's contribution.

The time for this round is short, so I will focus on rural areas. Chapter 4.5 of the plan refers to open countryside, which is where the vast majority of rural people live. They do so by choice because they have a fantastic quality of life. I am told that I am meant to live in the village. When I asked someone why I should live in the village, I was told that I would be near the local post office. I put my hand in my pocket and said, "Here is my bank, my travel agent and anything else I want, without leaving my sitting room." For most people, the day of having to walk to the post office is gone. Recently, I visited an industrial concern located two miles from my house. I asked the owners if they had the new broadband and they told me they have a Gbit, but the problem is that their customers in England do not have anything equivalent. We have broadband now and the idea that we all need to be in cities is out of date.