Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It provides a legislative framework for the proposed national planning framework. It passed the Dáil in January and is currently on Committee Stage in the Seanad but something has changed in the past three weeks. The initial focused approach has been abandoned and we now understand that what is about to be launched on Friday is neither the strategic, evidence-based plan for the development of Ireland based on solid data, on which we have been working, nor a Fianna Fáil-type spatial strategy in which every town in the country was notionally a gateway or a hub, which proved to be entirely meaningless. In 2002, there were nine gateways and nine hubs. The aim of that spatial strategy was to prevent the urban sprawl of Dublin but it abjectly failed. Instead, a hybrid of the two is to be launched, where proper planning is to be undermined by the intervention of the Ministers with the sharpest elbows. The Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Kevin Boxer Moran, gets to announce a new capital for the midlands, Sligo and Athlone have been promoted to the champions league of regional capitals, and Letterkenny, Dundalk and Drogheda are to be given some scraps as designated centres of growth. Drogheda was looking for city status as it is the sixth largest urban centre in Ireland. We are to have second-tier towns and, apparently, third-tier towns but those without any voice at Cabinet are to have no-tier towns.

To underscore the sense of drift, the commitment in the plan to have the new planning strategy underpinned by legislative authority also seems to have been dropped. It was to be binding on regional and local government in future planning decisions, and the Government's own Bill requires a draft of the plan to be approved, as the Taoiseach has written. He cannot have it both ways and say it does not require it because it is not yet law but that we will proceed with the law anyway, having ignored it. If the Government allowed Seanad Éireann just a few days more to complete the Bill, the draft plan would require approval of Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann before publication.

Will the Taoiseach publish all the underpinning documentation that supports the final draft when it is published on Friday? Will he tell us what evidential factors were taken into account in the redraft of recent weeks? What statutory footing will the plan which the Taoiseach is announcing on Friday have, and why is the Government rushing it out before the law we have been working on for three years is enacted by these Houses?

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