Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 31 January 2024
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Report on National Development Plan: Economic and Social Research Institute
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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So Dr. McQuinn does not know the scale.
On balanced regional development, Dr. Barrett stated: "While the spread of projects appears to reflect a reasonable degree of alignment between investment and population targets, the data available are too limited". That is a way of saying that we do not have enough people in the areas represented by Deputy Canney and me. Is it time to look at the matrix we use to calculate population targets? If we do not, we are never going to have the infrastructure front-loaded in a way that will allow us to encourage more people to live in the areas in question. In the context of infrastructure, I refer to projects relating to onshore and offshore renewable energy generation and the western rail corridor, which is basically shovel-ready and would tick an awful lot of the boxes. My main query relates to population and to decisions being driven by population data.