Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

I think there is enough linkage and there is more than enough guidance. Exactly as Ms O'Connor said, our understanding of what constitutes good design and good compact growth has evolved rapidly over the past five years. That is good and positive. We just need to continue to stretch that ambition forward. Taking the City Edge project, for example, that has come about in the past five years. It is a concept that has developed on foot of the 15-minute city concept. The challenge with all of these things is in delivery and making that delivery real. There are tonnes of examples of really good, high-quality urban design in many parts of the city, where the 15-minute concept works, is there and is demonstrable. There are other examples of design that is not so good, where the 15-minute concept has not been done or has not worked. Regarding the City Edge project, two things we tend to forget about when we want to encourage brownfield redevelopment are, first, it takes time and, second, it means the displacement of existing land uses. The City Edge project is about redevelopment of underutilised industrial zoned land around what are, in effect, high-quality future transport links. That industry has to go somewhere else and the question is where that will be. That is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that has not yet been quite figured out. The classic approach of letting the market determine is not a good idea.

We have come a long way in the past five years. Has the national planning framework been a success? At some levels, it has been successful in terms of educating us and setting ambitions. In other ways, it has not been successful in that we are now looking at it, reflecting and saying it has not been ambitious enough and we need it to be more ambitious. That is because our understanding of climate change and the import of it, as a community, by which I mean the global Irish community, has improved. We have become much more educated and involved. We understand climate change because we can see its ramifications in a practical sense.