The National Spatial Strategy - another failure

IN 2002, WHEN the Government published Ireland’s first National Spatial Strategy (NSS), there was some incredulity that so many “gateways” and “hubs” had been designated for growth – nine in each category; it was as if our political leaders had adopted Gay Byrne’s oft-repeated Late Late Show line about how there was “something for everyone in the audience”. They could not bring themselves to make the really hard choices that would have limited growth to a more select number of centres outside Dublin, such as Cork and Limerick/Shannon, over the period to 2020.

Eight years later, a review, update and outlook for the NSS has been published by Minister of State for Planning Ciarán Cuffe. Although written in bureaucratic style, it includes some facts and figures that add up to an admission of failure. Far from consolidating and strengthening Ireland’s cities, these show that the core populations of Cork and Limerick actually fell during the period while almost half of the total urban growth took place in and around towns with a population of 10,000 or less that were neither “gateways” nor “hubs”. A free-for-all was allowed to develop that turned many of these places into outposts of commuterland.

As Prof Brendan Gleeson pointed out in this newspaper yesterday, much of this can be attributed to “an unusual level of malfunction in Ireland’s system of development control, sourced mainly in political venality” by councillors over-zoning land for residential development, pandering to landowners with a “get rich quick” mentality. What we are left with, as he wrote, is “a dispersed landscape of defunct estates, massive infrastructure deficits, countless households and firms caught with toxic fiscal obligations and incalculable damage to what is, arguably, Ireland’s greatest and most enduring asset, its uniquely beautiful environment”.

The legacy of laissez-faire planning goes further. As Dr Edgar Morgenroth told the annual conference of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland yesterday, Ireland’s weak urban structure – with only one sizeable city – and its relatively dispersed settlement pattern was actually “reinforced during the boom” by permitting housing to be built far from where jobs were concentrated. As a result, transport costs here “will always be higher than other places”. And those costs are borne daily by a legion of commuters driving long distances to work, on motorways provided at enormous exchequer expense.

The real problem with the NSS, as Dr Morgenroth said, was that it was largely aspirational. Indeed, the only real fiscal impetus – a €300 million “Gateway Innovation Fund” – was withdrawn not long after being established, due to the rapidly deteriorating public finances. According to the latest review, the Ministers for Finance and the Environment are to “consider the timing” of a revised package of aid for innovative projects in the nine “gateways”. But with unprecedented cuts in public expenditure being considered, this pledge is unlikely to be honoured in the short term and the NSS will be left to limp on as the aspirational set of objectives it was from the beginning, with no real policies to back it up.

Growth cannot happen everywhere, says architect calling for emphasis on Dublin
FRANK McDONALD, Environment Editor in Westport

IRELAND’S ECONOMIC recovery is being damaged by the delusion that growth can happen everywhere under the National Spatial Strategy, according to a leading landscape architect and planning consultant.

Addressing the annual conference of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), Dr Conor Skehan said “misplaced notions of ‘fairness’ are doing untold damage to Ireland by pretending to offer something for everyone in the audience”.

With the economy “in freefall”, the Government needed to “start being realistic and not give people false expectations that there’ll ever be an Intel plant in Castlebar”, when in reality Dublin was the only internationally competitive city we have.

Describing Westport as “an artifact” and Dublin as “an organism”, Dr Skehan said official thinking “needs to move to the correct scale”. And while there were Ministers for the Gaeltacht and rural affairs, he complained that there was no minister for Dublin.

Dr Edgar Morgenroth, of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), told the conference that “parish pump politics tends to dominate”, with often bruising competition between different towns. “They can’t all have a university or an international airport,” he said.

Ireland’s weak urban structure – with only Dublin registering on the international scale – and its relatively dispersed settlement pattern had been “reinforced during boom”. As a result, transport costs here “will always be higher than other places – that’s now built-in”. Dr Morgenroth said the real problem with the National Spatial Strategy, adopted in 2002, was that “it is largely aspirational, with few concrete measures. What’s really missing is any adequate thought about what are we really trying to achieve and how do we make it happen.”

Dr Rory O’Donnell, of the National Economic and Social Council, said much of the discussion about regional development was conducted on the basis of “zero sum – they get it, we lose it”. He also described the NSS as merely “a template for policy”.

Property developer Richard Barrett, group chief executive of Treasury Holdings, said the Dublin region was not able to achieve its status as the main engine of the national economy because of the “guerrilla warfare” between its four competing local authorities. This had led to the provision of two convention centres – one in docklands, which Treasury developed, and the other at Citywest, on the periphery of the city.

At the same time, it was proposed to “drag all the waste into Dublin 4”, to be incinerated at Poolbeg.

He called for priority to be given to the public realm, to make it more inclusive, and for a recognition of public transport as a “social requirement for successful cities”. There was also a need in Dublin to “reinforce the centrality” of the river Liffey and the bay.

Mr Barrett said culture should also be part of the “tool-kit” to attract investment and tourists. “Cultural tourism is growing much faster than general tourism, and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has generated 18 times its construction cost.”

Referring to the debate about high-rise buildings, he said opposition to their construction was “a rational response to fear of the unknown” and he suggested that architects might help allay such fears by showing what these buildings might be like in context.

Kieran Rose, senior planner with Dublin City Council, said the debate about its development plan had been by vested interests and was largely about whether new buildings should six, seven or eight storeys high.

This was happening against the backdrop of “massive unemployment and economic crisis” as well as “policy disconnection”, and he cited the Government’s key policy on innovation, complaining that it made “no reference to space, cities or even Dublin”.

Kilkenny county manager Joe Crockett described Dublin as “the golden goose, an economic powerhouse”.

But he said the motorway network was transforming opportunities for the regions.