Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am a great fan of science fiction. I have to say that when I hear about visions for 2040 and for national planning frameworks, and the beautiful visions that are set out in such documents, I immediately think of science fiction.

The vision is beautiful but the reality often turns out to bear no relation whatsoever to the vision that has been set out. It is a bit like in science fiction where one has two genres - the one where there is a plan for the future that everybody can subscribe to and which has everything one would want in it. It is balanced, harmonious and integrated. It could happen if we planned rationally and democratically.

The other genre is the dystopian nightmare. I put it to the Minister of State, Deputy English, that the utopian vision that is often presented in these plans rarely comes to pass. Much more often than not we end up with the dystopian nightmare because regardless of how beautiful the plan is and how well thought out it is, the people who make the plan actually have no real power to implement it because they have ceded the power to make the important decisions to other people who have no interest whatsoever in the plan. It will not surprise the Minister of State to know that I am talking about the market and the dynamics of the market. We, as the democratically elected representatives of the people, set out a plan and consult with the people. There is, however, a question about the extent to which we have actually consulted or consult with the people who are the real stakeholders on this or any other plan. Even if we do this and we develop a well integrated and harmonious vision for the future, that plan is undermined, subverted, ruined and neutralised - whatever one wants to call it - by the fact that those people with large amounts of money, investors, people with capital, the banks, the developers and the private owners of the land are the ones who make the decisions.

With regard to previous spatial frameworks I have heard many of our rural colleagues in the House speaking on the destruction of rural Ireland. They know, far better than I do, about the realities of the destruction of rural Ireland. As an urban Deputy I absolutely agree with them. We periodically produce plans - this plan will do it again - which are aspirations to do something to ensure we have proper regionally balanced development and to maintain sustainable town and village life in rural Ireland. That is a beautiful plan, but does it happen? To date it certainly has not happened. We have had increasing centralisation in a few hubs such as Dublin, Cork and one or two others. This is regardless of spatial plans and the aspirations for regional development. Why does this happen? It is because the decisions about where investment happens are taken by big business and big capital. They dictate it. We have a Government, and I would say the two major parties in the State, that actively facilitate the ceding of their own power to these voracious entities and capitalists - to use old-fashioned left-wing language. We end up simply trailing and facilitating them. They decide where the investment is going to and the Government facilitates them, which renders all the plans nonsense.

I shall give a few examples in different areas. Ireland wants to sustain its small towns and villages but that cannot be done if the Government cuts the bus services while telling us that commercial viability has to be the main criteria by which we judge the viability of bus services. This is what is done and we hear it week in and week out, especially from Fine Gael. When Fianna Fáil was in government, however, it was not much different. We hear that the service must be commercially viable, but if we want to protect our small towns and villages then sorry, we need a bus service and public transport services whose future is not determined by whether or not they are commercially viable.

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