Wicklow County Council has been considering proposals to increase the size of Newtownmountkennedy by as much as 300 per cent, in effect creating a new town in the north Wicklow commuter belt.
The council has received planning applications for more than 2,200 houses, with associated shopping centres, offices and other commercial facilities.
These include Dublin house-builder Gannon Homes, which has plans for 240 houses; Garden Village Development, which plans 300 houses; Swanoaks Ltd, which applied for 248 houses; Springmount Ltd, which has put in for 412 houses and a shopping centre; Monalin Enterprises, which has applied for outline permission for 362 houses; and Dwyer Nolan, which has applied for permission for 383 houses. Dwyer Nolan has also applied for outline approval for 318 houses and commercial facilities in an application covering a separate parcel of land on the Newtown-Kilcoole road.
The council has also granted planning permission for an extensive indoor ski-run with a hotel, time-share apartments, a multiplex cinema and shopping centre. The development also envisages parking for 3,000 cars.
The council has scheduled its July meeting to consider an area development plan for Newtownmountkennedy, while the acting assistant county manager, Mr Bryan Doyle, points out that the County Development Plan targets Newtownmountkennedy as a growth centre.
Commenting on the development, Mr Doyle said the village was just 20 miles from Dublin and pointed out that the local authority had provided a 450-space car-park at Greystones to serve the DART. He also said people may travel the "other way towards Arklow" to work.
As regards the requirement for schools, they should be able to expand, he said. He referred to the Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs) which, he said, had created an imperative: "More houses have to be built".
Mr Doyle does not see why there is a push against the development of the town. "It has - or it will have - water and sewage; it has excellent access to the N11. The county plan identified it as a growth centre."
He said there was pressure for housing in the area and "the only thing that held back Newtown for a long time was the absence of sewerage facilities and we're now in a position to provide those in the short term."
However, the expansion of the town is being opposed by the Newtownmountkennedy Area Development Action Group (NADAG), which claims the scale of the plans suggests that a completely new town, the size of Wicklow town, was envisaged.
Significantly, the members of NADAG point to a draft report from Wicklow County Council's own planning consultant, Mr Kiaran O'Malley, which acknowledges that the SPGs "appear opposed to anything other than planning for local needs at Newtownmountkennedy".
They claim the SPGs are actually against developing land away from public transport corridors for housing and that the Dublin Transportation Office says national road routes should not be congested by commuter traffic.
With local population demands for housing "extremely modest", according to Mr O'Malley's report, the NADAG group claims the development is neither warranted by the local population nor by any national or even regional strategy. It would only serve property developers who have been buying up land in the area, the group argues.
NADAG points out that some facilities such as a new Garda station, the buses and health facilities are beyond the gift of either the property developers or the councils and any plan to enlarge the town should include consultation with all the service providers.
The group notes that the wider north Wicklow area, which outside Bray is the most heavily populated area of the county, is served by just one secondary school. The local TD, Ms Mildred Fox, has made it a condition of her support for the minority Government that a second school be established at Kilcoole. Despite her high-powered involvement it has not yet materialised, the committee points out.
But Dr Craig Bishop, a local GP and committee member of NADAG, says the group is not simply opposed to development. His concerns are about a community without a health centre, a bus service or even a link to the nearest rail line at Greystones, or a cinema or community centre. He is worried about young people with nothing to do in the evenings, he says, and he envisages a range of social ills should the plan go ahead.
"I see planning as multi-layered. The first layer is what is there, the ground, the topography, the environment. The next is an assessment of what the needs are; what sort of housing can fill these needs; where best to put it . . . These are the physical things. After that you move into the next layers, the quality-of-life layers. These carry the parks, the walks, the cinemas, places of social interaction."
NADAG has campaigned locally on the basis that the recent planning applications to which Wicklow County Council is responding were drawn up in the offices of property developers themselves or their agents. "They are not designed to address the wider social context," says Dr Bishop.
According to the Wicklow Fianna Fail TD, Mr Dick Roche, the existing communities of Kilpedder, the Garden Village, Kilcoole, Kilquade, Newcastle and Newetownmountkennedy "which suffer from inadequate sewage disposal, should have first call on any spare capacity before that capacity is turned over to further development."
He is critical of what he says is a prevailing attitude: that there must be more development before things get better for the existing community.
He instances Glenview Park, at Kilpedder, which he says has been operating on a temporary sewage plant since it was built about 20 years ago. Locals claim a nearby river has tested positive for raw sewage. The Garden Village - about 150 houses - is also reliant on its own treatment plant, as is another estate, Kilquade Hill.
The approach being taken by Wicklow County Council according to Mr Roche "is not planning, but licensing land for house-building".