Mark Dearey (Green Party)

The Minister is welcome. In 2002 I recall large towns throughout Ireland holding their breath wondering if theirs would be chosen as a gateway, the general welcome it received in my own town when it was chosen and the dismay in towns elsewhere that theirs was not. There was the compensation of being chosen as a hub and if a town was not so chosen, it could be something else.

At the time I was critical of the fact that the people who compiled the national spatial strategy did not keep their nerve and identify a series of large gateways that would act as a counterbalance to Dublin's overwhelming gravity in terms of how it brings in people, economic activity and wealth and allows very little of it back out. It is a very large city relative to the size of the country, and the national spatial strategy was intended to counterbalance this. It has not succeeded. I am being critical and clear-eyed but I believe there is much that can be taken from it that will help it succeed into the future.

I want to pick up on Senator Hannigan's point that decentralisation was meant as the mainstay of the national spatial strategy. That is a misunderstanding of both policies. It was widely recognised at the time, even by the champions of decentralisation, that it was running counter to the national spatial strategy's end game and that one policy was constantly at loggerheads with the other. We have now dealt with that position in a clear way. I commend the Department and the Government on doing that in regard to the decentralisation issue but to suggest that they were in any way complementary or that one was meant to underpin the other is a gross distortion of what happened. Decentralisation has not helped develop the kind of critical populations we need to be able to invest in a strategic way in large centres, for instance, to generate the kind of industrial policy Senator Donohoe rightly identified as being a key outcome from this strategy if it is to be deemed a success.

That is not to say - I am addressing Senator Ellis - that the people in Carrick-on-Shannon have not benefited from decentralisation. They have and it has been a huge success. I know it well. I have seen the town transformed by it and decentralisation has worked for Carrick-on-Shannon, but because it was not overlaid on the key objectives of the national spatial strategy, the two were at loggerheads until recent announcements on decentralisation.

The outlook takes account of the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. The O2 document was very much a child of its time. It was based on the prospect of ongoing economic growth, the idea that the boom could be based on land zoning and development and that this of itself would create the population centres we desired. We have seen that that kind of strategy has failed. An economy based on development and construction could not last. It came to a sudden and very costly halt for all of us. We have now turned our attention, rightly, to a different kind of economy, what we are calling a smart economy, that is not based on construction. It is hoped construction will have its role at approximately 10% of all economic activity but not the 25% it reached in the past.

For this new economy to work we need critical population size in the north west, the north east, Dublin, the west, the south west and the south. That would be it. We cannot do much more with our population other than to try to focus investment in a small number of centres where we can build the critical mass of skills and investment in terms of energy supply. The road network is in place now and it is a huge help. It will be vital to overlay that with better public transport, both inter-urban and intra-urban, but there is only so much we can do. A failing of the original document was that we tried to do too much by keeping every large and medium-sized town happy.

Proof of the pudding in that regard is the fact that 48% of all urban growth since 2002 has taken place in towns with a population of less than 10,000 even though towns of that size capture only 24% of the urban population. Forces other than the national spatial strategy have been at work that have led to urban populations growing other than where we planned for them to grow. This has occurred mainly because the large cities of Dublin, Cork, Galway and Waterford have attracted populations since 2002. They have not bedded into the fabric of the towns but instead are located as outliers in towns that are sometimes within striking distance but sometimes can be very long commutes from those towns and cities. As a result, the average car in the Republic does twice the mileage of the average car in Britain and throughout Europe. It is a striking statistic. I do not have the exact figures, but I know it to be the case that the amount of commuting created by the planning patterns we have allowed to develop is far in excess of British or European averages. That is not good news and it is not sustainable.

I said last week that the word "sustainable" was often used as a buzz word but few people have a grip on what it means. It is a plastic word in many ways and can mean what we want it to mean. I have heard it used in that sense many times. There is a touch of Alice in Wonderland about it. What we do understand, however, is the meaning of the word "unsustainable" because we have experienced it.

The country finds itself in the most critical time economically and in terms of social provision and so on than we have ever faced in the past. In budgetary terms we are faced with a massive challenge. Much of that is because of a belief - I am not saying it was done maliciously - that the growth could continue, that assets would be worth more next year than they were this year and that, therefore, the basis for lending into the economy was sound. As we have seen, it was not and we will be paying for the excessive lending for a long time to come.

This plan should be combined with the new Planning and Development (Amendment) Act, which I understand came into effect last week. It requires local authorities not to have reference to superior planning documents but to adhere to them, and the Minister of State, Deputy Cuffe, has indicated that local authorities that do not do so will face funding cuts. That is the kind of language local authorities understand, especially in these straitened times.

Senator Hannigan is correct that there is a degree of dissatisfaction among councillors, as I am well aware, given that I was one until very recently. For too long local authorities have been able to get away with references to superior planning documents while not taking a blind bit of notice of them when it came to voting on the night. We can see what has happened. Therefore, a more stringent approach is required, including better legal adherence in local area plans to county development plans, in county development plans to regional planning guidelines and in regional planning guidelines to the national spatial strategy. We have now provided for this in the new planning Act.

The gateway innovation fund, originally of €350 million, was meant to provide an investment stimulus for gateway towns. On the capital spending review, it was recently announced that this fund might be reinitiated in 2012 to the tune of €200 million. I know the original plans cannot be fully funded and that the applications made were, in many cases, very elaborate and ambitious. However, many also involved the building of eco-villages and large sustainable housing communities. Many of these obviously have to go, despite the aspirations being noble and exciting; I was excited by some of what was submitted by applicants at the time. However, we need to be careful how the €200 million will be allocated and ensure it will be allocated in a precise way to the gateway towns in a way that will underpin sustainable economic development, jobs in sectors that we know will last the pace and help to deliver a smart economy to keep our graduates here for good and not cause the brain drain that is threatening us. The fund has a very important role to play in that regard. If we can have a surgical strike within the gateway towns with projects that will keep people in towns and cities to allow them to grow and have critical mass that, in turn, will generate new services, it will have been money extremely well spent. It begins in 2012, before which a great deal of thought needs to be put into it.

I welcome the observation made within the plan that the regional development strategy for Northern Ireland and the national spatial strategy ought to lock into each other to find out where there are commonalities and opportunities for common service delivery. While that may sound like gobbledygook, what I mean is that if a hospital is needed in the Letterkenny-Derry or Dundalk-Newry corridor, the two areas explicitly identified in the document, it should be provided on the basis created by the two sets of planning guidelines to come up with a logical conclusion. I do not care on which side of the Border the hospital would be located as long as it served the region. In my case, there is a proposal to build a hospital which has really been designed to serve areas on the rim of Dublin, not the eastern border region, the natural alignment for the people living in the area. I welcome the fact the two plans will begin to spot opportunities for strategic investment, particularly in the areas of health care, education and transport.

I thank the Minister of State for his attention.