Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

The Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy and his colleagues turned the national spatial strategy on its head. Very few of the nine gateways and 11 hubs were selected for locating Government jobs through decentralisation. The latter programme failed miserably to reflect the issues headlined in the national spatial strategy. The Minister says he is implementing it, but when I put specific questions to each Ministry, the strategy appears to be completely ignored. I asked the Minister for Defence to outline the changes being made in his Department's plans, programmes, policies and spending, to which he replied that the publication of the Government's national spatial strategy had no implications for them. The Minster should use some joined-up thinking.

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