Lack of transport, amenities and childcare - residents in fast-growing, sprawling suburbs have clear priorities. But are politicians listening in the run-up to the next general election, asks Liam Reid, Political Reporter
It is a midweek afternoon and dusk is falling on Ongar village. Along its single street the shops are relatively quiet. A few bag-laden shoppers are leaving Dunnes Stores, while in the nearby cafe, two customers sip their coffees as the staff clear up around them. All seems normal here. And yet something feels artificial. The village is neater and cleaner than most, and its old-style buildings are painted in vivid tones, as if dreamed up in a Fáilte Ireland advert.
The reality is Ongar village is entirely new. Five years ago it existed only in the glossy images of a property developer's brochure. The village, and a majority of the 6,000 homes in its immediate vicinity in Dublin West, have sprung up since the last general election. In the space of a government term, rather than a generation, people are able to look at Ongar and say, "I remember when all this used to be fields".
Since the last general election, more than 300,000 new homes have been built in Ireland, with hardly a village in the country that does not boast a new housing estate.
These vast new estates of houses and apartments have gone up in a wide ring around Dublin and other cities, creating a new way of commuting life and dormitory estate living.
Ongar, and the neighbouring estates of Castaheany, Latchford and Littlepace, are at the epicentre of the housing and population explosion. On the very edge of Dublin city off the N3, they are located in the district electoral division of Blanchardstown-Blakestown, which has seen the single largest increase in population in the entire country since the 2002 Census, when it grew by 7,900 to more than 32,000 people.
And that electoral division is located in the constituency of Dublin West, which has the country's fastest-growing population.
The young residents of these new housing estates generally lead busy lives, juggling the demands of work and family and are what the Tánaiste Michael McDowell describes as the "coping classes" - a term which seems unconsciously patronising. However, for McDowell and all of the other largely middle-aged male politicians, these estates are virgin political territory, where the mostly younger residents, who have limited ties to the area, live.
All political parties have been engaged in a sustained wooing campaign of this population, and it will again be targeted in next Wednesday's Budget, with its anticipated tax cuts and stamp duty reform plans.
The Government's loss of both the Meath and Kildare North by-elections in March 2005 was attributed to the failure to address childcare, transport and education needs. The childcare package in the following Budget and parts of the Transport 21 plan were seen as a direct response to the demands of the emerging new neighbourhoods.
Sitting in the kitchen of her townhouse, Janina Wheeler believes she is coping quite well. A single parent with two children under five, she moved to Ongar three-and-a-half years ago and loves it.
"It's a bit like Trumpton [ the town in the 1960s children's TV series]," she says of the model village. "We wave at the digger man, and in the window at the hairdresser's and coffee shop when we're passing. Like in the shop where we get sweets - they'll know a little bit about our lives."
Michael Kinsella, who lives in Littlepace, is chairman of the Ongar Castaheany community council. Having moved to the area 10 years ago, he was one of the "pioneers". Good jobs close by, the large shopping centre down the road and good quality houses at affordable prices make the area attractive for many, he says.
But the drawback to the rapid expansion of the area has been that, while the 6,000 homes have been built in record time, the provision of infrastructure - from playing fields and community centres to schools - has come along at the normal, slow Irish pace.
"These facilities should have been built with the houses," Kinsella says. "Instead it's always a battle to get any facilities."
The most glaring deficiencies are in terms of education and transport, which every resident who spoke to The Irish Times highlighted as key priorities in terms of their electoral decision-making.
The public transport services are appalling. The nearest train station, Clonsilla, is not within walking distance, and rush-hour trains are too few and desperately over-crowded.
There is no local bus service, although the area has a frequent bus, the 39, which goes to Blanchardstown and on to Dublin city centre. The problem is the time it takes - more than two hours to travel the 16km to the Liffey quays during rush hour.
THE MOST CHALLENGING problem however, is education. The main primary school in the area is Mary Mother of Hope, Littlepace. At the time of the last election, when the school started, it had 55 children and three teachers.
However, the Department of Education grossly underestimated the number of families with school-going children, as they based their calculations on an assumption that many of the houses would be taken up by younger, childless couples.
Today the school has 585 children and 29 teachers. It is to add another 16 classrooms by the end of next year.
However, because of the demand, and planning problems, it is sharing its site with two other schools, the Castaheany Educate Together and St Benedict's, which are both in a series of pre-fab classrooms where the playground should be. In all, more than 850 children are catered for over three acres.
New school buildings for St Benedict's and Educate Together should be under construction at a site in Ongar, but planning and site difficulties are causing serious delays.
Back in Ongar, the education and transport problems are impacting on Janina Wheeler. Her little girl Claudia has just started school, and has to be brought the two miles to Littlepace every day.
Janina sometimes finds herself without her car, and is then reliant on public transport. Although there are 6,000 homes set out over a relatively large area, there are no local bus routes. It means Janina has to travel into Blanchardstown and back out again if she wants to get to Littlpace.
However, she has also been able to find a subsidised creche, which enables her to get "breathing space", which she finds invaluable as a lone parent.
Being a single parent who isn't working but has her own house, stamp duty changes and tax rate issues are not high on her priority list. "They don't affect me. What does is the lack of tax credits for childcare. It's not worth my while to go back to work. I would actually have less money."
She explains that were she to re-enter full-time employment, the salary she could expect would be mostly eaten up by childcare costs, and she would be worse off than she is now on single-parent allowances.
Wheeler may be coping well, but other stay-at-home parents find living in such large estates lonely and isolating, according to Joan Ashbrook from the Home-Start association in Blanchardstown. The charity is providing support to more than 50 families in the general Blanchardstown area.
"What's actually happening is that some mums are deciding to go back to work, not because they want to, but because of the isolation and loneliness of being in these estates throughout the day while almost everybody else is out at work," she says.
Tax credits for childcare are what Chris Gorman, who moved into the Ongar-Castaheany area just before the last election, would also like to see.
In his early 30s, Chris and his family live what has become known as the beltway lifestyle. The term is borrowed from the US to describe those families whose lives revolve along an arc defined by the M50.
He and his wife work at Intel, the US computer chip giant in Leixlip, further west along the M50. The road also assumed a vital importance for their childcare, after they were unable to find a creche space in Dublin 15.
They turned to a family in Donaghmede on Dublin's northside for help.
"I used to drive up the M50 and do a handover at a hotel carpark," Gorman says.
The couple now have two children, and Gorman's wife is returning to work in January. They again went looking for creche places. "We have a good intranet site at work, which gives a detailed list of spaces, and there wasn't one place for a one-year-old in all of Dublin 15," he explains. They have finally found a local woman who will take care of both children. For Chris, childcare tax credits would give them a choice about whether both would work.
He would also like to see some other tax improvements, and because he works in IT, the delivery of investment in research and development will also be important for him.
THE POTENTIAL IMPACT of these new estates across the country is not lost on politicians, and the nationwide €12 million voter registration campaign has been concentrated on new estates.
Brian Lenihan, the local TD and Minister for Children, readily acknowledges the infrastructure problems facing Ongar and Castaheany.
"There's been quite a response from Government," he says, pointing out that the issue of the schools was not due to lack of money from Government. "There's no block on the allocation of resources. The logistics of all of this are just painfully slow."
The Transport 21 plan will provide additional train services on the Clonsilla line by the end of next year, and the area will also be served by a new rail line serving Clonee, he says.
However Joan Burton, the local Labour TD and the party's finance spokeswoman, believes the State could do much more, and much sooner.
"The people living in places like Ongar are paying their part of the bargain," she says. "They're working hard, paying their taxes, they're contributing to society. The problem is that the State is not meeting its half of the bargain in return."
However, there is a much greater, more fundamental challenge than those relating to education and transport. A very high proportion of the houses and apartments in Ongar and Castaheany are investment properties.
As a result, and almost invisibly, the area has become home to one of the largest migrant populations in the country. While there are no definitive figures, the high proportion is evidenced by the fact that more than half of the children who began junior infants this year were from migrant backgrounds.
As the migrants arrive, established Irish families are buying homes farther out from Dublin, in places such as Navan and Kells in Co Meath, and Virginia, Co Cavan.
The concern that people will not put down roots in the area is greatest among those already living there. "We want to see greater integration, but it hasn't happened yet," Michael Kinsella says. However, he hopes that more community facilities and activities, such as sports clubs, will help address that.
"Yes it's a worry, especially with the apartments. We don't want to see them turning into a ghetto."