Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I wish to reinforce the point in support of the amendment. The key argument is we must put land use, transport and housing together. I want to draw from personal experience, going back to the formulation of transport plans for Dublin as far back as the late 1990s, when A Platform for Change was the transport plan which developed. It was based on very good planning work and there was an underlying use of modelling to assess likely demographic shifts and look at changing work patterns. It had a range of different demographic projections of what would change. That provided a bottom-up granular and really detailed plan as to where people were likely to live and move. It assessed the transport options on the back of this, and certain criteria were set such as that everyone should be within ten minutes walk of a public transport high-quality corridor. Out of it came a recommendation plan for transport in this city. I remember distinctly, as I was a member of the transport advisory committee of Dublin Transport Office at the time, that there was a clear recommendation from the planners and people involved that whatever we did we should built the metro and the DART interconnector first and then the electrified rail system out to west Dublin and elsewhere, and if we did not do that the planning approach would not work. The exact opposite happened. We widened the M50 first and continued to build the national motorway network, which all reached the M50, and that is about to clog. It is a classic example of where, to my mind, we will have really deep consequences now in terms of a lack of connection.

This is not just with regard to Dublin. The big planning problem we face is there are big doughnuts of development outside all our main cities. We have a statistical map showing those commuting long distances of more than 30 km a day. We see huge rings around Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin, a hollowing out of cities in terms of population decline in Cork, large areas of Dublin city centre and Galway, and massive development of out of town and very far distant rural housing connected to urban centres. We have the huge expense of providing public services, and the huge expense in daily life spent commuting is something we have to reverse and address.

Unfortunately, nothing has changed. We have IBEC coming out in its submission to the national planning framework with the most insane road-based system we could possibly imagine. This is IBEC, and it is a cuckoo plan with more than 15,000 km of new motorway and dual carriageway. We have the city of Galway, which is probably the worst example, where everyone lives on one side of the city and works on the other side. I remember at the time, when all of the ring roads and roundabouts were being built back in the early 1990s, a very smart engineer said to me those roundabouts would not work and that the transport system was mad, and so it has proven to be. What are we doing? We are still building more ring roads and more out of town sprawl systems.

I commend the amendment in the sense that it brings to our attention the need to put the planning and transport planning frameworks together. This goes back to the policy debate we had earlier. While we have to give cities and regions great freedom to work out what their development model will be, one of the criteria we should set for a planning regulator and all our local authorities is that whatever else happens we have to stop the ever lengthening of our average daily commute because it is costing us dearly. It is one of the metrics to which we have to return. It is not just about bringing life back to Dublin, but about bringing life back to the centre of villages, towns and other cities throughout the country. If we do not start doing this, we will have an incredibly expensive health system because how do we service people in distant locations, and we will have an incredibly inefficient economy. In every system we look at, the form of the planning we have been pursuing over the past 30 or 40 years, whereby 40% of our houses are one-off houses in the country, is just incredibly expensive in the end. We have to start living closer together because it is so much easier and cheaper to provide public services. I am not against one-off housing, but it is a rational assessment of how we provide the services people need in an efficient way.

We cannot continue with the sprawl. That has to change, and it has to be the first central direction to any planning regulator. The metric in terms of success is whether we are reducing that need for transport because for too long we have allowed it to expand without any thought to the costs involved.

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