Decisions about how and where new housing is to be built are "fundamental" to our economic success and the future of Irish society, according to the Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal.
Opening a three-day National Housing Conference in Galway, Mr Robert Molloy said housing had to be provided in a planned and sustainable manner, using the most up-to-date technologies and making a positive contribution to the built environment.
With the economic, demographic and social factors underpinning the "extraordinary demand" for housing likely to continue "for years to come", the challenge was to provide the necessary amenities and transport infrastructure to build communities.
However, Mr Colm McCarthy, of DKM Economic Consultants, said the Government was "focused excessively on the promotion of housing demand and home ownership" while paying too little attention to where new housing was being built.
Pointing out that much of the current growth of the Greater Dublin Area (GDA) was actually taking place outside its boundaries, he suggested that this trend towards long-distance commuting was being ignored by the authors of the GDA strategic planning guidelines.
At the beginning of the 1990s, he said the rate of housing completions in Dublin city was about the same as the rest of Leinster.
However, by last year housing development in Dublin had fallen back while completions in the rest of Leinster increased four-fold.
Not for the first time, Mr McCarthy noted that towns outside the GDA, such as Gorey, Carlow, Portlaoise, Mullingar and Dunleer, were rapidly developing as commuter locations in an ever-widening belt around the capital and its new "main street" - the M50.
Given this emergence of a "dormitory suburb pattern" throughout Leinster, and the fact that the "magnetic field" exerted by Dublin could not be "somehow switched off", he believed it would be unwise to select any town in Leinster as a growth "gateway".
If the Government was interested in pursuing a policy of compact urban development Mr McCarthy suggested that investment in high-quality rail systems should be restricted to core urban areas inside the M50 rather than accommodating more suburban sprawl.
This would be a policy "which says, in effect, that you can live in rural splendour if you wish and commute to the city but we will not make it easy for you".
The alternative was to "preach coherent urban development while subsidising incoherent sprawl".
The Dublin city manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, said while there were no magic solutions, the Government's decision to establish the Greater Dublin Authority to oversee strategic planning and transportation was a move in the right direction.
The supply of more housing was at the forefront of every Government and local authority agenda. Yet despite the full-time efforts of a dedicated team, housing output in the GDA had stalled at 15,000 units per annum, 2,000 short of what was needed.
Mr Fitzgerald said it was possible that some developers were not inclined to increase outputs at a time of uncertainty and he warned that "any complacency in this regard runs the risk of further market interventions, which might best be avoided".
Within two or three years, he predicted, most social or affordable housing would be provided under Part 5 of the Planning Act 2000, which allows local authorities to reserve up to 20 per cent of any housing development site to meet such needs.
