The new National Spatial Strategy, with something for everyone in theaudience, will spread development too widely and thinly, argues Frank McDonald
The Taoiseach inadvertently gave the game away when he described the National Spatial Strategy published yesterday as a 20-year plan "designed to enable every place in the country to reach its potential, no matter what its size or location".
What it offers, in other words, is the great promise of a chicken in every pot.
The trick of being able to offer, or at least appear to offer, something to everyone in the audience is, of course, a prerequisite for clientelist politics. And who knows this better than one of its greatest practitioners, Bertie Ahern himself? He didn't get where he is today without understanding that politics is a game to be played locally.
Yet there is a grain of truth in what the Taoiseach had to say. If the strategy works, the State will be humming with new "gateways" and "hubs", with direct benefits for people living in these favoured growth centres and spin-offs for everyone else within their orbits. That's why he talked about the plan as painting a win-win scenario.
But the central weakness of the strategy is that it designates far too many growth centres, spreading development as widely as possible. And as thinly, too, especially in these leaner times. As a result, the likelihood is that nowhere will develop a sufficient "critical mass" to compete for investment with the economic engine of Dublin.
How can it be credibly maintained that any or all of the designated growth growth will be made "similarly attractive" to Dublin, in terms of their ability to attract investment, when there are so many of them? Especially with a caveat that Exchequer investment "will need a sufficient level of economic growth to generate the required resources".
Most damaging of all, the strategy effectively reinforces the long-established laissez-faire approach to the growth of the Greater Dublin Area. This is justified by its authors on the simple basis that it has become so "vital" to the national economy that capping its 40 per cent share of the State's population "is not a realistic objective".
Yet Dublin and its hinterland has only become as important as it now is because of a consistent failure to curb its growth. It is more than 30 years since Prof Colin Buchanan produced his blueprint for regional development, with the central aim of drawing some of the heat away from Dublin by promoting growth in Cork and Limerick, in particular.
Then, as now, clientilist politicians could not bring themselves to run with his recommendations, for fear of disturbing the grass roots. So in 1972, the then Fianna Fáil government announced that Dublin's growth would be allowed to continue and that other places would get an IDA advance factory and, possibly, a regional technical college.
We're now back to where we started. Except this time, as a direct result of political cowardice in the past, the Greater Dublin Area (including Meath, Kildare and Wicklow) now accounts for 39.2 per cent of the State's population, compared to 35.7 per cent in 1971. All the indications are that the GDA's critical mass will continue to feed on itself.
And on much of the rest of Leinster, too. As the authors of the NSS acknowledge, significant increases in population over the past five years alone in Westmeath, Wexford, Laois, Louth and Carlow also "confirm a widening of the Dublin commuter belt, well beyond the GDA". Dublin, in other words, is becoming a very dispersed city.
All of the major inter-urban roads - those planned to be replaced by motorways or dual-carriageways at enormous expense, under the National Development Plan - lead to Dublin.
And though the NSS proposes a mesh of other corridors to provide better links between, say, Cork, Galway and Sligo, these have not been given high priority.
"In certain exceptional circumstances . . . there may be a category of infrastructure whose provision is particularly critical to supporting the growth of, for example, a new gateway it may be necessary to consider, over the 20-year horizon to which the NSS relates, the advance provision of key infrastructure ahead of actual need."
Not much of a cast-iron commitment there. Similarly, referring to public transport, the strategy suggests that integrated development "can be assisted by, for example, retaining alignments such as disused rail lines for possible future use". Nobody must have said that to Iarnród Éireann before it recently severed the western rail corridor at Athenry.
Though the NSS talks a lot about clustering economic activities in the designated cities and towns, as well as keeping them "as physically compact and public transport-friendly as possible" to minimise urban sprawl, no firm proposals are made to provide public transport systems or even bus services in any of the new "gateways" or "hubs".
The strategy also fudges the highly-contentious issue of housing in the countryside. Nowhere do the authors refer to their own startling discovery that "one-off" houses in rural areas accounted for 36 per cent of the 50,000-plus new homes in each of the past two years - a deeply unsustainable pattern of development.
Even though the Government's Sustainable Development Strategy, published five years ago, said there must be a presumption against the spread of urban-generated housing in the countryside and the latest document is ostensibly committed to the principles of sustainable development, it does not come down particularly hard on this issue.
This may be regarded as something of a victory by the Minister for Rural development, Éamon Ó Cuív, who has become the champion of repopulating rural areas - even with people who work in towns. The right of farmers, as they would see it, to profit from the sale of sites for bungalows must be protected at all costs.
All in all, the National Spatial Strategy does not provide a coherent plan for balanced regional development. Neither will it halt the Los Angeles-like sprawl of Dublin into surrounding counties, with all the traffic congestion and other pressures that go with it. At worst, it is a recipe for business-as-usual, which we all know hasn't worked.