Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The publication of the final national planning framework, NPF, consultation represents a unique opportunity to set out an ambitious vision and 20 year strategy for what our country should and could look like in 2040. Much work has been undertaken to get the Ireland 2040 document to the stage of being on display for its final round of public consultation.

The national planning framework is primarily intended to plan properly for what will be one of the fastest growing economies in Europe over the next couple of decades, focusing development on existing villages, towns and cities and realising the potential of our regions and our rural areas. We now have the opportunity to plan and manage the sustainable growth and development of our country over the next 20 years or so. That is very challenging. We are not starting from scratch given that we have an already developed country, with five main cities, and a developed network of transport infrastructure. We have great history and heritage in our built environment that must be protected and we have to be conscious of climate mitigation targets and putting sustainability at the forefront of all of our endeavours as we grow.

By 2040 there will be at least an extra 1 million people living in the Republic, taking the population to 5.75 million, approximately a 20% increase on the current population. The all-island population will be roughly 8 million people, and there will be an extra 600,000 jobs, mainly in the knowledge economy and in services. We will need 500,000 new homes for all of these people. The population aged over 65 will double to 1.3 million people or almost 25% of the total population. Those aged under 15 will fall to under 1 million people.

It is not possible to know what the political and economic challenges might be for all those people living and working here in 2040, but there are political and economic challenges that we have to be aware of now as we plan. Brexit is the most obvious one, but there is also the question of how the future of the European Union might evolve and challenge us. The current retreat from globalisation and free trade being pursued by certain countries might impact on matters such as foreign direct investment. Technology will bring changes in how we work and where we live, with remote working, the shared economy, drone technology, automation and artificial intelligence. We must protect communities as we grow and regenerate parts of our country where we can. As recent events remind us, our climate is changing and we need to take the immediate steps to adapt to those changes and put in train changes to address the drivers of climate change by de-carbonising our way of life and taking advantage of the many opportunities that come from that.

If we continue to grow as we have been, if the status quocontinues, depleting our communities and our regions, sprawling away from our urban cores, our cities will choke off, in particular our economic engine in Dublin, and the country will die. People might question this notion. They might say that things, relatively speaking, putting to one side the crisis of homelessness and the shortage of housing, are not so bad. We are in the top ten when it comes to human development, gross domestic product, GDP per capita, foreign direct investment, FDI, and democracy. However, we fall into the top 20 when it comes to quality of life and environmental performance, and into the top 30 in Dublin when we talk about liveable cities.

Our national planning framework has to have a vision that will navigate us through these challenges, both the existing ones we know of such as protecting the environment, and the challenges that may come due to developments external to us. We have had spatial strategies before and they have failed. This vision will be different because it will be aligned across Departments to ensure coherence between what the framework envisions and what others are planning, be it in respect of schools, hospitals or roads. The finalisation of Ireland 2040 as a draft in September was driven by the Government's decision to align the forthcoming ten-year national investment plan, NIP, with the national planning framework, avoiding past mistakes where decisions on where to spend scarce public capital investment were made before the national spatial strategy was finalised. We are putting our money where our mouth is. Our capital investment will underpin our planning framework so that these plans are real. The national framework will be the bedrock or foundation of all other development plans. It will be completed this year. Next year our three regions will be tasked with coming up with more specific regional spatial and economic strategies based on the framework and in more detail, with city and county plans based on that, and local area plans on them. This will be the new hierarchy and it will be set in law. Finally, there will be a smart growth fund put in place centrally to enable regions to target growth and development for key areas by competing for additional funding, based on the merit of the project and as long as it is in line with the ten-year NIP and the NPF.

One of the core principles at the heart of the NPF is to concentrate growth in the core of our population centres, to focus development on existing villages, towns, urban centres and cities, to stop sprawling inefficiently outwards, and to focus on higher density and on infill development. This is particularly important within our cities.

As the economy continues its recovery, and as we build more houses and improve the lives of people locked out of the housing market or trapped in emergency accommodation, a key challenge for all of us will be to meet the expectations of people when it comes to important quality of life issues. Turning our attention to issues such as commuting times, energy efficiency of homes, affordability and community will also make sense from an economic and efficiency point of view as we capitalise on existing and planned infrastructural investment.

Our cities and large towns are growing as major centres of employment but they are not growing quickly enough as places to live in. The population of Ireland grew by 53,000 in the year to April 2017, the largest increase since 2008. That is 1.1% year-on-year growth when the rest of the euro area was essentially static. Half the daytime population of Ireland's three largest cities travel from outside of them. One quarter of Leinster's working population travels into Dublin each day. In 2016, some 230,000 people commuted at least an hour a day each way, a 30% increase in long commutes in just five years. Think about what that means for families' quality of life. If we learned anything from the so-called Celtic tiger era, it was that our future does not lie in our people living in one location, and commuting up to 100 km to work, juggling work and family lives and losing the battle to strike a reasonable balance.

With fewer than 1,000 properties available for rent in Dublin and similar low levels in all our other cities, there is not just under-supply, but a gaping hole in the supply of affordable accommodation and rental accommodation in particular in the hearts of our cities and large towns. Turning that tide means we simply have to deliver more apartments in our cities and towns. While we have an immediate housing crisis to face if we pause to plan, even for just a moment, we can tackle the crisis and secure the sustainable development of our country and communities into 2040 and beyond. We must think about the impact of our actions now on the decades ahead if one crisis is not simply to roll into another.

We have to try to manage that growth between our five cities, as well as between our three regions. In Dublin, that means 25% of national growth happening within Dublin. Half of that will be inside the M50 so we will need joined up planning across the local authority areas and new land plans for important strategic land banks. It means another 25% of our forecast growth is happening in the cities of Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Galway. Each of these cities will have to effectively double in population size at the very least. It also means that 50% of the population growth will happen everywhere else. Approximately 15% of the growth will take place in the fabric of our towns, villages and rural areas and there are opportunities coming for this from changes in technology, job types and the ways in which we will live and work in the future. Another way to look at it is that half of the anticipated growth between now and 2040 will take place on the eastern seaboard and in the midlands, with the other half in the southern, western and northern regions. This all has significant implications for what we build, how we build it and where we build it. If we think of that quality of life challenge, then we have to build communities as we look to 2040. A quarter of our population will be over the age of 65 so we have to build communities that will suit that population and will also suit people with disability or other health needs and their quality of life as we plan for the future. We also have to plan for affordability - being able to live close to work at an affordable price so that people can live their lives in the way that they choose to.

Work on this framework has been ongoing since the end of 2014. Engagement with the relevant stakeholders, the general public and other governance agencies and bodies has been central to the formulation of the draft. Road shows have been undertaken, initial public consultations carried out and an expert advisory group established, and over 700 submissions received from a whole range of stakeholders. Now, as part of this draft consultation on Ireland 2040, submissions are being accepted up to 3 November and a series of regional briefings have already commenced with each of the three regional assemblies. After the period for submissions ends, it is my intention to have a finalised version of Ireland 2040 for the consideration and approval of the Government by December. This will take place in co-ordination with the finalisation of the ten-year national investment plan, again underlining a very important pillar of this new national planning framework. Returning again to how this differs from spatial strategies of the past, we will be aligning our planning for the future with our investment plans and this will be the bedrock for all future planning coming down the line, be it in the regional spatial economic strategies that will be designed and developed next year, or in the county and city that will flow from them. There will also be alignment across Departments and Government investment to make sure that there is co-ordinated thinking and planning as we grow into the future. We will grow as a country and we will grow in every part of the country. There needs to be joined up thinking in promoting that growth so that we can have better and more efficient towns, villages and communities for our population in 2040 and beyond.

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