Dublin's growth crisis to persist

A continuation of the housing and traffic crises in the Dublin area was predicted yesterday by Mr Brian Hughes, lecturer in urban economics at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Mr Hughes, who predicted last month that the population of the greater Dublin area would rise to 1,935,000 by 2011, said the latest figures from the Central Statistics Office bore out his contention.

"The CSO figures for the last two years are very slightly down - they show 58 per cent of the population growth occurring in the greater Dublin area as opposed to 65 per cent for the two years before that," Mr Hughes told The Irish Times.

Taking this into account, his forecast for population would now be 1,905,000 - still very much on target.

Mr Hughes said the problem facing Dublin was that the population was growing more quickly than the supply of houses. This was fuelling the spiralling price of houses. He said if the figures were maintained over the coming years the population of greater Dublin would exceed the rest of the State by 2050.

Mr Hughes said it was important that planning issues were tackled or "we will continue to suffer the effects of infrastructural bottlenecks and a housing crisis far into the future."