It will take £6 billion "seed money" to get Fine Gael's eight new growth centres off the ground over the next 10 years, a Fine Gael seminar heard.
Road, rail and air access are the starting points for all these growth centres, the conference in Tralee was told. Letterkenny, Kilkenny, Sligo, Castlebar, Athlone, Portlaoise, Dundalk and Tralee are the centres earmarked by the party.
Tralee needs £95 million for improved access roads from Killarney, Listowel and Limerick, according to the North Kerry TD, Mr Jimmy Deenihan (FG). And £28 million is still required to upgrade the Mallow-Tralee rail line, he added.
Kerry Airport needs an injection of £4 million for improvements to terminal buildings. But it has the potential to increase its present capacity of 75,000 passengers to 200,000.
The seed money for these centres is already in the National Development Plan, but it needs to be targeted along the lines of the EU structural funds, said the Fine Gael spokesman on finance, Mr Michael Noonan.
He said part of the plan to select growth centres would entail the decentralisation of whole Government departments, not just sections. Based on a cluster system, the idea would be to disperse sections of a department centralised in the growth-centre Tralee to towns such as Killarney, Listowel and Killorglin.
"The idea is not that Tralee could be developed at the expense of other towns, but that it will act as a development node for the hinterland," said Prof Gerry Boyle, of the department of economics at Maynooth.
The key to selling these new cities to the public rested with stressing the regional benefits, said Prof Boyle.
The creation of eight new cities over the next 20 years was no longer a choice, it was a necessity, the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, said.
"What we have got to look at is the consequences of not doing this. We will have a wealthy country leading an awful life," Mr Bruton said.
Lack of childcare facilities, traffic congestion in which "Dublin is choking to death" and no integration of social life were some of the prospects of not developing these regional growth centres.