There is surely something wrong with the Irish planning system. Two institutes, representing architects and planners, feel moved to challenge the ability of many local authorities to deliver the kind of environment where people would be happy to live.
That's what the Irish Planning Institute and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland did earlier this month in calling for a "radical overhaul" of local authority systems, so that higher-density housing schemes could be properly designed and planned.
What worries the president of the RIAI, Mr Eoin O Cofaigh, and the IPI president, Mr Niall Cussen, is that only a few local authorities employ architects while some still don't employ a single planner, 35 years after the 1963 Planning Act came into force.
How they can expect to safeguard the environment and promote sustainable development handicapped by such a glaring skills deficit is a mystery; doubly so given the frenetic level of construction activity that has put the planners under pressure.
Dublin Corporation's planning department is run ragged trying to keep up with the flood of new applications. And because many of its most experienced planners are now involved in other projects, development control is often left to junior planners on short-term contracts.
Planners in Ireland - unlike, say, the Netherlands - spend most of their time processing planning applications rather than applying themselves to designing cities or towns. It is doubtful if they could: most of them have no background in architecture or urban design.
Yet, as both Mr Cussen and Mr O Cofaigh know only too well, achieving higher housing densities is critically dependent on local authorities having detailed development plan policies, including action area plans with a three-dimensional architectural element.
Specifically, they want the new consolidated Planning Bill now being drafted to allow local authorities to reject planning applications on the basis of poor-quality design: incredibly, this is something they can't do now without running a compensation risk.
For too long in Ireland, planning was almost exclusively exercised in two dimensions, using broad-brush zoning on coloured maps. This is what produced much of the built environment we live with today, and it can hardly be regarded as an advertisement for planning.
There is still not much of a sense anywhere in the Republic that the environment has been "planned". Tens of thousands of urban-generated houses litter the countryside, suburban housing estates are both mono-cultural and soulless and industry is often inappropriately located.
Undoubtedly, some of the worst excesses have been perpetrated by councillors abusing their powers either by rezoning land against all planning advice or tabling "Section 4" motions requiring permission to be granted for developments that would otherwise be refused.
No longer can there be any doubt about long-held suspicions that this type of skulduggery spawned a culture of corruption in certain quarters, with a number of members of Dublin County Council, in particular, receiving cash in brown paper bags from their clients.
Whatever the councillors might like to pretend, it remains a fact that decisions on 99 per cent of all planning applications are made by senior officials, usually the city or county manager, based on recommendations made by a professional of some sort, usually the county engineer.
More often than not, even when planners are employed they are lower down the bureaucratic pecking order. The vast majority of urban district councils must rely on the planning expertise (if any) of their parent county council. Three counties have no full-time planners at all.
Yet no matter how many conditions are attached to planning permissions, enforcement is virtually non-existent. Unauthorised development is rife in the land: many developers simply go ahead with whatever project they have in mind and then apply for retention.
Anything goes, particularly if it seems to have the backing of central government. Thus, most of the local authorities charged with looking after the 13 seaside towns where a notorious tax incentive scheme applies have felt compelled to approve clusters of holiday homes.
Similarly, after the first Urban Renewal Act in 1986, planners in Dublin and other cities with designated areas adopted a liberal regime, granting permission for anything that moved, such was their anxiety to facilitate development, and turning a blind eye to all sorts of gimcrack.
In the early 1990s developers were permitted to use the centre of Dublin to carry out a variety of often hideous experiments, the worst involving the production of large schemes of shoe-box-sized "apartments" laid out along narrow, artificially-lit corridors.
But things are improving. The latest batch of urban renewal tax incentives are linked to achieving quality standards in developments that would contribute not just to the physical rejuvenation but also the socio-economic revival of rundown areas.
The whole programme is also grounded in integrated area plans (IAPs). Dublin Corporation submitted six of these and had all of them accepted, which is a testament of their quality. Part of the credit must go to the city manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, for encouraging this approach.
"Fitzgerald took something that didn't work and made it work," a Dublin architect commented. He also understands the need for area-based management. This was pioneered by Temple Bar Properties and its three-dimensional approach should be applied elsewhere.
Mr Cussen, who has been an unusually vocal president of the IPI, said the complex problems faced in Ireland today require a multi-disciplinary response involving planners, architects, engineers and others. He would also welcome the involvement of more architects in planning.
He said the approach taken by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, in encouraging local authorities to employ more planners was "a breath of fresh air".
Only with more resources could they hope to become catalysts of change in their own areas, Mr Cussen believes.
As he sees it, the challenges facing Irish society are daunting, particularly on the housing front. According to the ESRI, we need to build 38,000 to 40,000 new housing units a year for the next 10 years; equivalent to a Cork city every year, which is pretty astonishing.
The key question is whether the city and county managers really want a quality planning service and are prepared to invest in the human, technical and other resources necessary to deliver a visionary planning system that is articulated in three-dimensional form.