Ms Mary Rose Burke:

I refer to the Deputy's first point about the miracle that the country has survived at all. It is not a miracle. We had a construction, banking and public finance collapse, catastrophic as it was for the economy. In 2009, the private sector and the real economy corrected, which meant job losses at the time. From that date, it created jobs again and from 2010 onwards we had record year after record year of exports. The real economy recovered, therefore, and it is on the back of the real economy that the public finances recovered. I make that point because it is important to note that the infrastructure to support the real economy is the substance of our report and that is what we are discussing.

When it comes to where people live and where the work and how they get from A to B, distance is important. We know from the 300,000 people working for our members that they do not want to be shipped in from commuter towns. They do not want to spend their time even on efficient public transport. They want to be able to live near where they work, they want a short consistent commute time and they want to be able to live in the city. Dublin is like a doughnut city at the moment because of a failure of housing policy going back decades and multiple Administrations. Other cities in which people enjoy a good quality of life manage to have high quality, high density living in a small nucleus within them. For instance, people in Copenhagen have a good quality of life. The city is not congested with cars but that did not happen overnight. They dealt with congestion and sprawl and they said that was not the way they wanted to live their lives. They had cross-party agreement and 30-year plans to allow for the proper development of the city. We would like a housing policy that would encourage high density, high quality living in Dublin. Rathmines is a village in the city, which is an example of working high density. It is an attractive place to live. Our experience of what we think is high density such as the towers in Ballymun was not high density at all. They were medium rise, low density towers and they were a failure of social policy.