Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

This is an incredibly important debate. I was in a different location for the debate on the national spatial strategy. What flowed from that was hubs, gateways, spokes and all sorts of things, which meant nothing was going to happen.

The biggest flaw in the national planning framework is the plan to limit the growth of Dublin and the greater Dublin area. One cannot stop people having babies, so there will be natural growth. The only way to limit the growth physically is by not zoning land for housing. That will increase the price of land and housing enormously.

11 o’clock

Neither do the framework's projections appear to take account of any inward migration in coming years. There is much talk about Brexit and its opportunities but some of them would require us to assimilate an additional population. There are good arguments for doing that in the context of the ratio of working population to pensioners and how we project that into the future, for example. The projections seem to be based entirely on natural growth and even at that, they are very low. The population growth in Dublin will be higher than projected. The plan is to limit the growth of Dublin. It does not make sense.

I believe in balanced regional development. Going back to the 1990s, I remember being on the Dublin Transport Initiative, as was Deputy Eamon Ryan who is in the Chamber. A strategic planning approach was to be deployed and it looked at different scenarios such as scaling up Dublin city in order to limit the sprawl. In practice, we got the worst-case scenario and now have nine, 10 or maybe 11 counties that have Dublin as their focus, which creates significant traffic congestion. We must ask why that happened. It is not enough to have a planning framework as there must be the means of delivering it. The must be a tie-up between the national capital plan and the national planning framework. If one seeks to have balanced regional development, it must be about more than merely diverting funds, because funds are required to overcome the difficulties caused by the worst-case scenario. This will cost us heavily in fines, which focus the mind. I was told at the Committee of Public Accounts by the Department of Finance that it would be €600 million annually for missing our targets on climate. Some of that is due to the settlement pattern here and, for instance, we must spend money on the Dart interconnector if we are to overcome the congestion issues as a consequence of that.

The population changes are interesting. If one examines the changes between 2001 and 2016 in several locations, one will find that Dublin city and Dún Laoghaire both grew by 13%, while south Dublin, Fingal, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow grew by 23%, 43%, 44%, 39% and 28%, respectively. The great increase happened along the arc of Dublin's periphery, with that in Fingal being the largest. Cork city grew in those years by 1% whereas the county of Cork grew to a greater degree. Galway grew sequentially, which is unusual. If we are to have balanced regional development, it must be coherent and sustainable. That means our city cores must grow but they cannot grow without the infrastructure which provides for a sustainable pattern of growth.

I strongly favour balanced regional development because without it-----

See this speech in context