Mr. Aebhric McGibney:

I would like to add a couple of points. If we do not get growth in the economy and raise living standards, the national planning framework and how we grow the economy will be a failure. Spending is set in the context of where the national planning framework is going to evolve. The national spatial strategy, which tried to prioritise 22 towns and several other ancillary towns, did not work at a time when public spending was not really constrained. We spent a lot of money. Was it sustainable in terms of the economic activity and the lifestyles it supported? Transport is a big issue. We do not have the cost-benefit analysis as we discussed. Higher density does not automatically mean height. In many other cities, there are between three and six storeys. It does not have to be 20 storey mega towers. People need to live closer together. This is a challenge for the whole of Ireland. If there is more one-off housing, if people move out, the service costs for health, education and transport are higher than when people are clumped together in towns and cities. Perversely, recent incentives are to get people into towns having let them build a house a couple of miles outside the town.

It is not the case that Dublin has received more capital spending than anywhere else in the country. It is at the bottom of the list. Edgar Morgenroth at the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, produced figures for spending per capitawhich show that for Dublin it is two thirds of the national average. Every other region gets more capital spending than Dublin. My only caveat is that the data goes up to 2009. No more recent data can be prepared because the data is not produced in order to make the analysis. We need more data from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, on national income accounting figures and we need more information from the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government. That data is getting out of date but if we had the extra data from the Department, Edgar Morgenroth and the ESRI could produce it.