Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am conscious Deputy Flaherty might want to come in, but I have one other question. On the idea of border areas where two development plans come together, the one with which I am most familiar is the north fringe, which everything from Finglas right across the north of Dublin city. Deputy Ó Broin would have it in the south city. Not enough work is done by local authorities to ensure key parts of the city have an integrated approach to planning. I constantly cite the example of Meakstown and Charlestown in my area where Fingal County Council effectively zoned huge swathes of land, allowed a significant shopping centre to be built right on the edge of Finglas, did not put in any community services and so on to support it, benefited from the rates and the development fees as result of that, and it took the best part of ten or 15 years for it to catch up and try to put in some of the community infrastructure. We are still working on that and we still have a lot of challenges. Even in this round of the development plan, there are examples of sites I would have said had the potential to deliver some housing on them whereas Fingal County Council is taking a more enterprise or commercial development approach to it. I am not a party to that plan, so I cannot influence it, but I still think not enough work is being done on the fringes of cities, where development plans work together. It is a structural problem. There is a border there. The OPR needs to examine that area, where two development plans come together, to ensure we do not inadvertently set up a system where centres become important and everything on the fringe becomes unimportant, with the fringe areas losing out as a result.