David Norris (Independent)

I have some brief observations to make as I have been, and should be soon, in another place. While I welcome the national spatial strategy, I have some reservations about its implementation, which is where the real problem lies. Nobody can argue with the fact that there is an enormous imbalance between the population in the greater Dublin area and elsewhere. Greater Dublin is now taken to include counties Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, to which so many dormitory towns are spread out. Its population is over 1.5 million in one large conurbation, almost 40% of the national total, which indicates a high level of imbalance with all its attendant problems.

It is astonishing to me, having grown up in the late 1940s and 1950s when places like Athlone and Boyle were remote, that people now commute from Mullingar and Arklow. There must be something wrong with is. It is obvious that the balance must be redressed and jobs brought back to the areas concerned, if possible. The Minister will know, as Fianna Fáil is a very pragmatic party, that there are great difficulties in managing or controlling an economy or country. It is difficult to direct people where and how to live because they tend to vote with their feet.

It is interesting to note in this regard that the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Éamon Ó Cuiv, has apparently won his battle to allow once-off housing developments in a strict manner in the countryside. This goes against the policy suggested by those behind the national spatial strategy. I sympathise with some aspects of what the Minister has said, but it is intolerable that farmers can make their income simply from speculative development and the sale of sites for bungalows. They find various ruses such as claiming a development is for their children when often it is not. There was a classic example of this type of freeloading in the west recently – I believe in Sligo – where a Traveller was accommodated on land given to him for £1 and then sold it for £300,000. More power to him. He was, if the House will forgive the expression, a cute hoor in doing so. However, too much of that kind of thing leads to distortion.