Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The good news is that figures from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, show that there are 44,000 fewer unemployed people than this time last year, which is a major improvement. Now that we have got over the major unemployment difficulty, we need to start planning for the long term. Part of that planning should involve infrastructure development. We have not had a major debate on that matter. Senator Kieran O'Donnell has raised the Cork to Limerick road or, as he would say, the Limerick to Cork road, and the Cork city north ring road. We need to plan for infrastructure development and set out a clear plan including sourcing the funding to do this work.

The population of the country will continue to increase. There is no point in responding to it after it has increased. We need to plan for the increase. Part of it is about rail, road and the whole infrastructure, including our health care system, school system and third-level institutions. We do much of our planning in our urban areas in a piecemeal fashion. We produced a Cork area strategic plan. Although it was great to do a plan, not all of it was implemented, and it causes the bottlenecks that subsequently arise. I might be appropriate to have a debate on the issue of infrastructural development and decentralisation from Dublin.Rather than having 200 jobs in 40 or 50 different areas, we should focus on five or six key areas. We need to debate the matter.