Mr. Paul Hogan:

When we did the national planning framework, we looked at the cost of sprawl and dereliction versus alternative scenarios. The scenario we chose was 40% development nationally within the existing built-up footprint of towns and cities. That is compact growth. It is not even half, at 40%, and that is based on research we access from Canada and Australia, where the levels of growth are similar to that in Ireland, that demonstrated that the long-term cost of sprawl is twice that of more compact forms of growth-----