There can be little doubt that a prodigious amount of work was put into preparing the National Spatial Strategy published by the Government yesterday. There can also be little doubt that the proposals put forward by a small, dedicated team of planners in the Department of the Environment fuelled several arguments around the Cabinet table.
Indeed, if some Ministers had their way, many more growth centres than the number finally agreed would have found their way into the strategy. It is to the credit of the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, that such clientelist political pressures - parish-pump politics, in reality - were to some extent resisted.
That being said, the strategy as proposed lacks a clear, unambiguous focus. Although it is apparent that some tough decisions had to be made if it was to have any credibility at all, it is equally evident that hard choices were avoided in the interest of minimising political uproar in towns that felt excluded. Thus, development is spread as widely as possible, through the designation of no less than nine major "gateway" growth centres (including Dublin) and an equal number of secondary "hubs". As IBEC complained yesterday, the fact that so many towns have been prioritised greatly reduces the potential of the strategy to support ongoing economic and social development.
The central aim of any strategy for balanced regional development in Ireland must be to relieve the overwhelming pressure on Dublin. That is precisely what the late Colin Buchanan tried to do as long ago as 1969 by proposing that Cork, Limerick and a limited number of other locations should become alternative growth centres. But even then, the Government did not have the nerve to do that, with the inevitable result that Dublin and its hinterland grew like Topsy over the past thirty years and now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the State's population. Yet there is no signal in the latest strategy that the capital's unmanageable growth will be seriously restrained in any way.
Indeed, the strategy baldly states that such a policy "is not a realistic objective", primarily because the diversion of employment growth away from the Greater Dublin Area "could damage the successful dynamic achieved in the GDA which is of vital national importance." The reason is simple: "In many cases, the choice for mobile international investment would then lie between locating in the Dublin area or elsewhere in the world." So what chance is there in this scenario that Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Dundalk, Sligo, Letterkenny or the triangle formed by Athlone, Mullingar and Tullamore, not to mention the nine "hubs" will develop the required critical mass to become "similarly attractive"?
Very little, it would appear, especially as there are so many of them. The Government may have flunked it yet again.