Councillors in the Republic sometimes complain they have no real power over planning applications. But they're better off than their Northern counterparts who have no say at all in controlling development of their own areas.

At least in the South the adoption of a development plan, which lays down the framework for assessing all planning applications, is a "reserved function" of the elected representatives. Indeed, it has been through their control of this process that some of the worst land rezoning abuses have happened.

Not so in Northern Ireland. None of its 26 district councils has any say whatsoever in the preparation and adoption of development plans for their own areas. They are only entitled to be "consulted" by the Department of the Environment, which is the sole planning authority in the North.

The department's Planning Service rules the roost, unchallenged by local democracy. It is even copying the English practice of issuing planning policy guidelines dealing with such issues as retailing, industry or housing. But in the North, these have become statements of policy, to be treated as the law of the land.

Whereas in England and Wales, planners say guidelines are flexible enough to be interpreted in a local context, Belfast's version supercedes all district development plans. "A planner sits there, looks at a proposal, checks the policy statement and then makes a decision based on it," one critic of the process complains.

"This is done within the civil service culture, which is all about administration and consistency," he says. "It reduces planning to a process of ticking the appropriate box, paying no attention to the uniqueness of a town or stretch of countryside, and puts decision-making in the hands of bureaucrats."

The application of uniform policies, directed from Belfast, ignores the differences between, say, Fermanagh and north Down. "If you take retailing, a standard policy doesn't make any sense in terms of sectarian geography. What Catholic is going to shop in Portadown? People will gravitate to where they feel safe."

The North has six divisional planning offices - in Belfast, Derry, Omagh, Craigavon, Ballymena and Downpatrick - and two sub-offices in Coleraine and Enniskillen. But the absence of local democratic input into their work is compounded by the fact that some decisions are being made by unqualified planners. This is not unique to the North. In the Republic, despite the passage of 35 years since the 1963 Planning Act, there are still some planning authorities which get by without employing any professional planners, while others are seriously understaffed and almost unable to cope with the insatiable demands of the "Celtic Tiger."

At least in the South, there is still a third-party right of appeal - something which does not exist north of the Border or in Britain. In the North, interested members of the public can only express their views at formal public inquiries into draft development plans or at oral hearings in cases where a scheme has been refused. But unlike An Bord Pleanala, which can overturn a planning inspector's report without having to give any justification, the North's Planning Appeals Commission operates a completely transparent system and Belfast-born planning consultant John Reid says he has "never heard a whiff of criticism of it".

In general, Northerners must depend on the Department of the Environment's Planning Service to uphold the public interest. And with so many different ministers since 1972, all of them with constituencies in Britain, the issue of how to interpret the public interest has been left to professional administrators.

This will change, of course, with the election of a Northern Ireland Assembly, especially if it appoints an Executive to take over the running of most departments, in line with the Belfast Agreement. For the first time since Bill Craig built the North's motorways in the 1960s, Northern politicians would have a direct role in planning.

Craig intended the M1 to show that Northern Ireland had embraced the 20th century - unlike, by implication, the "Free State" with its pathetic boreens. That was the time when Unionists firmly believed people in the South were still living with pigs in the parlour; the "Celtic Tiger" has put an end to that fable. "The South seems to have made a jump from snagging turnips to writing software, leaping from the bog to the computer laboratory without any intervening industrial era," says one observer. Nowadays, Dublin is increasingly seen as a cosmopolitan city, by contrast with the relentless provincialism of Belfast.

Cross-border co-operation, never one of the North's strong suits, is bound to become much more important because of the provisions of the Belfast Agreement. This will be particularly significant in the context of drawing up plans with an eye to gaining more EU funds after the current tranche runs out at the end of 1999. It might lead to such projects as a new road bridge over Carlingford Lough, near Narrowater Castle, to gain more benefit from the wide dual-carriageway linking Warrenpoint with Newry; at present, residents of the Cooley peninsula in Co Louth must make their way to Newry on a narrow country road. Agreement has finally been reached on the route of a new cross-Border motorway between Dundalk and Newry, which will largely follow the line of the existing road. Projects already completed as a result of other North-South initiatives include the Shannon-Erne waterway and the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise express.

Public transport seems to count for even less in the North than it does in the South. Apart from the Enterprise and the rail link across Belfast's harbour, it has rarely received any priority. All the emphasis has been on major road schemes such as the West Link, which looks as if it was hacked through the city with a machete.

When the British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, came to Belfast recently to unveil his aid package, it was inevitable that yet more money would be earmarked for roads - including improved intersections on the West Link, which is congested at peak periods. As in the South, the road engineers nearly always get their way.

Carrickfergus Castle, the most important medieval fortress in Ireland, is cut off from the town by a dual-carriageway intended to cater for heavy industries which have long since closed down. "This was one of the daft things they did, because it has screwed up Carrickfergus as a tourist town," one planner complained.

Belfast, once the quintessential Victorian city, lost much of its urban coherence due as much to the depredations of road engineers and property developers as the activities of terrorists. Its core, much more markedly than Dublin's, dribbles out very quickly, with vacant sites pressed into service for commuter parking.

But unlike Dublin, which has been irreparably scarred by low-density suburban sprawl, the North's capital remains sufficiently compact to sustain a good public transport system, if only the authorities would provide it. Indeed, one of the few significant achievements of planning in Northern Ireland has been the Belfast Stop Line.

First marked out in 1969 (the year the Troubles started) and adjusted here and there as time went on, the "stop line" has helped to contain Belfast, by stemming suburban sprawl and ultimately forcing developers to seek out "brownfield sites" such as Laganside, where a Docklands-style renewal programme is under way. In Dublin, because of widespread land rezoning on the periphery, they are still able to "go romping through the fields", as one planner says. "It's the `little house on the prairie' approach and Dublin has been ruined by it." But then, the North can hardly point to Craigavon as a particularly good example of its planning.

A heartless collection of disparate housing estates, this "new town" - conceived, like Tallaght, in the 1960s - remains a planning pretence. Its existence led to Sainsburys getting permission for a huge store in the main shopping centre on a roundabout outside Craigavon, providing formidable opposition to traders in Lurgan and Portadown.

But the centre of Belfast, once ringed by security fences during the height of the Troubles, has managed to retain its role as the city's primary retail area, with such "anchors" as the Castle Court shopping centre - far superior to the St Stephen's Green Centre in Dublin - and a profusion of trendy restaurants such as Roscoff's.

The splendid Waterfront Hall has become the symbol of the new Belfast, built by the City Council while the South dithered over its National Conference Centre. Behind it, two towers will house a new Hilton Hotel and British Telecom offices, adding to the confidence that this marks a real change in the city's fortunes.