Authorities who ignore guidelines on housing threaten plan

As local authorities around Dublin ignore a formal request from the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, for developments that comply with Strategic Planning Guidelines, the Government's National Development Plan is under threat.

The Government drew up the Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs) to identify where local authority efforts to provide housing should be directed - and crucially, where housing should not be provided. However, local planning decisions and strategies around the country do not appear to reflect the goals of these SPGs.

Acting Wicklow County Secretary Mr Michael Nicholson appeared recently to accept that development of the villages of Kilcoole and Newtownmountkennedy was specifically precluded by the SPG, since both villages are in a green belt hinterland area. Yet Mr Nicholson said the council was going ahead anyway, and added that the plans would be very hard to change even though the statutory public consultation period is not yet complete.

In Co Cavan, a recent planning application for several hundred houses in Virginia may get a go-ahead because of the housing shortage in Dublin. Those in favour argue that as 80 per cent of the inhabitants of the scheme would work in Dublin, permission should be granted.

Yet the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, has specifically asked local authorities not to do this. A spokesman for the Minister confirmed last week that following the publication of the guidelines, the Department wrote to all the relevant city and county managers asking them to ensure that their development plans complied with the guidelines.

The Minister himself said, on the publication of the guidelines, "I intend immediately to formally ask each authority to amend their development plans to ensure that they are fully in line with the SPGs."

The economist Dr Peter Bacon, has indicated that infrastructure is the key to the housing crisis. Consultant economists DKM, which advises the Government on policy, recently produced a paper critical of planning authorities which advocate development as far out from the centre of Dublin as a 25-mile radius.

The paper pointed out that the M25 ring route around London is 25 miles from the centre of that city and contains within its circumference a city of eight million people. A similar ring around Dublin contains just one million people, indicating that Dublin's future development should be in higher density along transport corridors.

Throughout the country, roads are being upgraded or entirely rebuilt, a third millennium communications system is being installed, the gas, electricity, rail and service water networks are all being brought up to "best practice" standards.

The developments, to take place in one seven-year period from 2000 to 2006, represent possibly the State's greatest "leap forward". The key element of Government planning is to spread the current economic prosperity to the regions outside Dublin; ensuring that this is done is the incentive behind the massive infrastructural activity.

This strategy has been accepted by the Minister, Mr Dempsey, but not by the planning authorities who seem to have learnt little since the development of sprawling Tallaght 25 years ago.