The smugness of Official Ireland congratulating itself for last year's record output of 50,000 new homes, without any reference to where they were built, has finally exposed claims about "sustainable development" as mere cant and hypocrisy.
Because the most shocking piece of news at the National Housing Conference in Galway this week was the revelation that nearly 40 per cent of the national output during the first year of this century consisted of "one-off" houses in the countryside.
And what is really depressing is that there is no political will to stem this tide of suburbanisation colonising rural Ireland. So what hope can there be that the present Government, or its successor, will ever adopt a sensible national spatial strategy?
The need for such a strategy, currently being worked up in the Custom House, has never been more urgent. We are facing the daunting task of building up to 500,000 homes over the next decade to cater for a growing population fuelled by economic growth.
While some of us may rail about "bungalow blitz" because of its inherent unsustainability on any social or environmental scale, it carries on regardless. Must we now accept that this phenomenon, unique in northern Europe, is simply part of what we are?
As Mr Arthur Hickey, president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, said in wrapping up the three-day conference, the proliferation of "Dallas-style" houses in the countryside raises fundamental questions about how we want to live. If "bungalow blitz" truly reflects the will of the people and continues to swallow up more than a third of total national housing output every year, how can we expect to plan sustainable communities and achieve more balanced regional development?
One-off housing in rural areas represents the extreme edge of suburban sprawl. Little bits of Dublin popping up in the form of new housing estates tacked on to nearly every town throughout Leinster are almost equally unsustainable.
Mr Hickey is not alone in conceding that the magnet of Dublin, Ireland's only real city in European terms, cannot be set aside. However, as he said yesterday, we can introduce measures which will deflect development to other parts of the State.
That is the real challenge of a coherent national spatial strategy, and there is a growing belief that one of the few realistic ways of counteracting Dublin's magnetic field is to concentrate development in a corridor between Cork and Limerick.
Where else, apart from Galway, would there be any chance of creating the type of "critical mass" required to attract investment? Yet it is hard to imagine politicians with the courage to say no to other regions clamouring for their share.
If we really want to curtail the sprawl of Dublin, we will have to face up to the fact that there can't be "something for everyone in the audience". Difficult choices must be made in the national interest; otherwise the capital will consume everything.
Of course, Ministers can point to policy initiatives such as the Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs) for the Greater Dublin Area. However, even these guidelines are likely to lead to more sprawl, as economist Mr Colm McCarthy has repeatedly warned.
The great need is to consolidate urban areas, not just Dublin but Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. This can only be done by developing more densely, looking at all available opportunities from brown-field sites to under-used green areas.
And it's not as if there are no models. During the three-day conference, participants were particularly inspired by examples of sustainable housing schemes in Denmark and the Netherlands which are successful by any social or environmental benchmark.
Yet in Ireland we always seem to believe that we must reinvent the wheel. This is most evident in the cautious approach of the building industry and its Homebond insurance scheme to innovative construction techniques.
Why shouldn't system-built, timber-framed housing, for example, work as well here as it does in other European countries? What is so unique about our climate that we must depend on scarce, and therefore very expensive, bricklayers to build most of our housing?
And given the now very diverse housing market, which includes many more single people or couples with no children, as Mr Jim Pike pointed out yesterday, why should the norm continue to be a three-bedroom or four-bedroom "semi" with gardens to the front and rear?
All of these issues need to be confronted if Ireland is to have a sustainable future. For in 10 years' time, when population growth is expected to level off, the country which we create will be cast in concrete.