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THE LULL in construction activity after the frenzied years of building, which has left Ireland with ghost housing estates and inappropriately located developments throughout the State, must be used as an opportunity to plan for a more environmentally sustainable future. That is the central message of a series of thoughtful papers in a special issue of the Journal of Irish Urban Studies, published today.

The result of a four-year research project led by UCD, in collaboration with NUI Maynooth and Trinity College, it makes the point that so many of the “flawed” decisions by planners during the boom years were made in a vacuum, with no hard evidence of development trends, prices and patterns available to them. Against that backdrop of official ignorance at every level, with the banks dishing out loans to developers and housebuyers, it is no wonder that we ended up with a mammoth burden of debt.