The strategy is very late, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
The key issue about the National Spatial Strategy is whether it will work at all if too many cities and towns are designated as "gateways" or "hubs". In a period of depressed economic growth, such a strategy would spread development so thinly that none of them would have the required critical mass.
The NSS is coming very late in the day, nearly halfway through the implementation period of the Government's National Development Plan. It was supposed to be finalised and published much earlier this year, but was put on the long finger because of the general election in May and the Nice referendum.
No government would have wanted to indicate its intentions on spatial planning in such a political atmosphere. Even now, in the run-up to Christmas, next week's provincial papers will be full of stories about "winners" and "losers" in the race for development, as some towns celebrate and others fume about being left out.
We already know that the alternative to balanced regional development is what we have at the moment - the chaotic sprawl of Dublin, not just on its outer periphery but throughout Leinster, within a 50-mile radius. The reason is simple: as a result of laissez-faire planning, Dublin is our only serious economic engine.
The reported inclusion of a triangle in the midlands, formed by Athlone, Mullingar and Tullamore, is questionable. Will it (or they) become an autonomous unit or merely another satellite of Dublin? Indeed, can anywhere in Leinster be designated for growth without running that risk? The answer, at this stage, is probably not.
If future growth was concentrated in, say, Cork or Limerick-Shannon, there would be a real prospect of creating other centres with the critical mass to attract inward investment. Spreading growth around so that there would be "something for everyone in the audience" may meet clientelist political considerations, but it is bound to fail.
Another issue that will be closely analysed is what the NSS will have to say about rural housing; specifically, about the fact that 36 per cent of the total output of 50,000 new homes in each of the past two years were "one-off" houses in the countryside. This trend is clearly unsustainable and must be tackled if the strategy is to be credible.
The Minister for Rural Development, Mr Ó Cuív, has insisted that the NSS would reflect his own view that rural areas need to be repopulated, even by people who work in nearby cities and towns. It will be instructive to see whether he has won the argument on what has become an extremely contentious issue in rural Ireland.
There is also the question of transport. Under the National Development Plan, all five of the major inter-urban motorways radiate outwards from Dublin. Yet the Government still seems intent on building them even as it turns a blind eye to Iarnród Éireann's recent severing of the potentially useful western rail corridor.
Other European countries have produced spatial strategies that make sense. But they are much better organised than us, with a much clearer vision of where they are going and how they will get there.
What we are good at, on the other hand, is making it up as we go along. And that's not planning.