Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is an area for which he has responsibility. We will look forward to him showing his prowess there, and I have no doubt that he will. The assurance I can give the Deputy is that, in the context of the national planning framework that has been published, it is the intention of the Government that half of all the population growth that would occur will be outside of the major cities. The major cities outside of Dublin will be growing at twice the rate of Dublin. There is a very clear commitment that the infrastructural spines in which we will invest in the coming ten years will be to support much more rapid growth outside of Dublin than we have seen in the previous years. For the first time ever, we are underpinning a national planning framework with a ten-year capital programme. We are tying our infrastructural investments to the spatial-regional, strategy. That is the crucial decision that has been made by this Government. It was never done before and we have seen the consequences of not having a clear connection between a Government's capital decisions and its ambitions for spatial planning. That is fundamentally changing on this occasion.

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