Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to think we will have a full strategy by 2015. In the meantime, investment decisions are being made so perhaps it will be possible to publish the broad outlines at the beginning of next year. That would be very welcome.

It is hard to believe, but we have the fastest growing population in Europe and it will continue to be the fastest growing until 2060. The population was forecast to reach 4.5 million by 2020 but we had already exceeded that by 2011. We are well on our way to 5 million and by 2060 it will apparently be over 6.5 million. It is a good thing to have a growing population because it offers the potential to obtain the kind of critical mass necessary for sustainability in a number of growth centres, rather than having fragmented development as in the past. We can get it fundamentally right or wrong, so it is important to grasp this window of opportunity as investment growth continues. It would be an absolute travesty if we made the same mistakes as in the Celtic tiger years when we were putting 500 houses into villages that had 50 houses. We somehow expected that it would be sustainable, but that played no small part in the economic collapse. We do not want to go down that road again.

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