Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for this opportunity. I was starting to worry that we would not have it. While I am not sure if it was by design, when the draft was published a few weeks ago, there was not a word about it. There was no national call that I could see to analyse the draft that was published and make sure people made submissions by 3 November. I am pleased the Government has given us this opportunity. I submitted a 5,000-word submission. It is not that I think I have exclusivity on the best way to move forward, but I have suggestions. It is fair to say that none of those suggestions made their way into the draft plan and I wonder if anybody else's did. I read all of the available pre-consultative-phase documentation related to the national planning framework. The draft is remarkably similar. It makes me feel that it was written already and we are just going through the motions now and will do what we want.

I was involved in the chamber of commerce network in drawing up submissions for the consultation phase of what was then the national spatial strategy. Of course, the major mistake before we even started was that we got it back to front. We had the national development plan followed by the national spatial strategy. At least we are approaching this correctly from a chronological point of view.

I am not encouraged by what I see in the plan. I know many people spent a considerable amount of time working on it, but I believe it will preserve the status quo. I fear we will do exactly what Deputy Durkan hoped we would not do, meaning that whoever is in these seats in 25 years will again be considering how to deal with the very same problems, except worse, that we are dealing with here today. This is the exacerbation of the eastern conurbation for want of a better expression, including Deputy Durkan's county and that of Deputy Thomas Byrne, who already highlighted some of the issues here, and ignoring areas where there is capacity.

I often use the following analogy. If Ireland were a shell and core unit of 10,000 sq. ft., we have only chosen to use and have serviced about 7,000 sq. ft. of it. Therefore, our output is limited to that space. Equally, we have done this in a planning context. With the virtual border that exists north of the Dublin-Galway line and perhaps west of Mullingar, that section of the country, with about 30% of the landmass, about 400,000 people and a great amount of capacity, is largely being ignored. No party or government since the foundation of the State is without blame in this regard; in fact they all share blame in not taking a strategic approach. They have regarded the north west of the country as a pain in the national side and thrown it an odd bone of placation from time to time depending on who happened to be influential in their party or in a senior position whereby a project would be undertaken to address a certain road, hospital or school. There is has been no strategic approach to open up that third of the country.

I am not advocating for the Sligo Olympic bid, nor am I advocating for us to build the Mayo Clinic at every crossroads, but it is foolish in the extreme - sadly, the draft plan does nothing to change my view - that we are choosing to ignore at least 30% of our capacity as we look to the next 20 years. Huge challenges are there. All the indications are of a population increase of 600,000 or 700,000 and all the challenges and difficulties that would present.

We need to consider alternatives to preserving the status quo. There are some givens. Dublin is the national driver and it is vital that it can thrive. It is bursting at the seams at the moment. It badly needs its outer orbital route, the metro and numerous other things in order for it to maintain its position and be able to be a national economic driver. Equally Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway need to be resourced. Each of these cities has its own challenges at the moment. Galway is a beautiful place and everybody loves it. It is thriving and alive, but it is strangled with traffic. We need to open up that 30% and put the infrastructure in place to allow us to perform to our potential.

To do that, the region needs a driver, and, obviously, I will focus on the north west. The Government needs to choose a location for that and I might have my own view on that. From reading the plan, there is a reference in section 3.3 on page 44 to the regional drivers north of Galway city being Derry city. As much as I want to see a united Ireland - and would do almost anything to see it achieved - in the absence of the Northern Ireland Executive, which I hope will be back in action soon, the responsibility for Derry city is in Whitehall and London with the Tory party. Are we implementing a plan for the next 20 years for the Republic of Ireland and taking refuge in what is going on in Derry? We are blind. If the Government wants to open up that region, three road links are required. One is a motorway linking from the M1 through Tyrone over to Letterkenny and Derry. Another is a motorway on the M4 opening all of that end of the country. The other critically important one is an M17 to give Galway city the benefit of Ireland West Airport Knock and to open up the entire north-west region to the benefit of that. Then we would begin to put a region to work for itself. There is plenty of ingenuity among people to make that region into a genuine contributor rather than it being seen, by consecutive Governments of whatever colour, as a drain on national resources. This plan lacks that vision. It is more of the same. It is underpinning the status quo, whereby we will stuff 700,000 additional people into the existing primary and secondary cities with nothing in the north west, which we hope to preserve as a weekend retreat for those people in search of Peig Sayers looking out over a half door smoking a pipe and having a pint of Guinness, but that represents a poor use of our resources. There is nothing in the plan to provide that we would open up that 30% of the shell and core unit, increase our national output, perform to our potential and have the whole nation contributing, rather than this area been seen as a drain. I will have much more in my submission which I do not have the time to go into today.

In terms of planning locally and the issue of rural planning - Deputy Thomas Byrne touched on this earlier - we have a tradition where people live and work in the countryside. We have contradictory situations in which An Bord Pleanála is blocking rural enterprise and rural housing while at the same time, other arms of the State are trying to promote that. The Government cannot have it both ways. Deputy Durkan mentioned that we had a population of 8 million people back in 1840s. That is true. County Sligo, for example, had a population of approximately 185,000. Does the Minister of State know how many of those people lived in what we know today as Sligo town? The figure is 7,000. We have a tradition where people work and live in the rural economy and whether the Government likes it or not we have to facilitate that and we should seek to do that.

I am not talking about a hospital consultant or somebody who is from a town, like myself, going out and building a trophy home with a view of the lake or the sea or the mountain. I am talking about people from such areas and, as was touched on by Deputy Durkan, the repopulating of those areas. How many ruins of derelict cottages that were once the homes of those 188,000 people in Sligo remain? They are still there. Why can we not put homes back there? The way wastewater treatment has gone is infinitely better today than it was even ten years ago and we should seek to promote that. Equally, we want to promote more forms of sustainable living and attract people into towns. There are two things the Minister of State needs to do about that. First, there is the idea of Part V provision and full integration in a town in order to have the appropriate mix of social and affordable housing, as well as private housing. That is great and very honourable but the sad reality is that we are not dealing with a blank canvass. The average nationally in this respect is approximately 14% of social housing, whereas in Sligo, Limerick and Cork, the figure is over 30%. There is an issue in those three locations where we need to attract in more private housing to complement the balance. We will not do that unless we attract in people. For senior citizens in particular, and as I age myself I can see the benefit in this, why are we not incentivising the construction of apartment blocks with a 24-hour concierge service? We could tell people that if they live in a town, we would waive their property tax and that the State would provide free broadband and free services to encourage people to move to live in towns, particularly older people who would like to have the shop, the general practitioner, the pharmacy and so on their doorstep. If we do not do that, it is going to continue the way it is. However, we must also be cognisant of preserving our culture, whereby people live in rural Ireland. We should not pander to the minorities, hiding behind measures such as the Water Framework Directive or other such measures. We should look for innovative solutions so that we can preserve and promote that culture. I will leave it at that and I hope we will have other opportunities to discuss this.

Clearly a great deal of work has gone into this planning framework. It is not all a waste. It certainly is not. However, if one dreams, one should dream big. This is not a strategic vision for the next 20 years. It is one that is preparing us to stand still but we need to be prepared to push the boat out.

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