Not for the first time, Mr Noel Dempsey has put his political future on the line by spelling out in stark terms the "disastrous consequences" of our past failure to make hard choices - in this case, by shelving the Buchanan report on regional development some 30 years ago.
The Minister for the Environment was speaking yesterday at the publication of a public consultation paper on the National Spatial Strategy, Indications for the Way Ahead. He chose his ground well: Charlestown, Co Mayo, birthplace of Mr John Healy, whose crusading series of articles in The Irish Times in the late 1960s, Death of an Irish Town - later published as a book, No One Shouted Stop - graphically documented the plight of the west.
In 1969, as Mr Dempsey noted, a British planner, Mr Colin Buchanan, had set out to put things right by plotting a course for more balanced regional development to counter the unrestrained growth of Dublin - only to have his blueprint torn to shreds by parish-pump politics.
Three decades later, the National Spatial Strategy is trying to pick up the pieces. According to the Minister, it has the potential to inject new lifeblood into Charlestown and many other towns, whether large or small - but only "if people can look wider than their own patch".
The consultation paper published yesterday is not, of course, the strategy. What it does is to lay out the broad principles on which the strategy would be based, in seeking to develop a "critical mass" for a limited number of places spread through each of 12 "functional areas".
The need for this approach was underlined earlier this week by the publication of figures showing that the State has a population of 3.84 million, the highest for 120 years, and by projections that it could be as high as five million by 2020.
Where this additional population will be accommodated is the crucial issue which the strategy is trying to address. There simply has to be a "spatial vision" to provide a coherent framework for investment in infrastructure extending over a 20-year period.
But will it "play in Peoria", as Mr Richard Nixon used to say, or Ireland's equivalent of that litmus-test town in Illinois? This depends on whether the planners and senior officials in the Custom House are right in suggesting that Irish society is now mature enough to "buy" into it. The argument they make is that people can see for themselves the consequences of laissez faire "planning" in producing the explosion of Dublin, with all its congestion, and the absence of alternative growth centres of significance.
They point to the experience of Denmark, another small but successful European country with a dominant capital city, and how the Danes managed to draw some of the heat away from Copenhagen and redistribute it by pursuing more balanced regional development.
Those involved in drafting the Strategy may be codding themselves, however. Just look at what happened after the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, announced last year that a further 10,000 civil servants were to be "decentralised" to the provinces. No less than 130 urban areas, some barely bigger than villages, became embroiled in such an unseemly scramble - a multiple "smash and grab raid", as Fintan O'Toole put it - to secure a share of the action that the programme itself had to be pigeon-holed.
"Carrick-on-Suir Welcomes its Government Department" says a large sign outside the South Tipperary town. If that's the ecstatic reaction to bagging a few civil servants, the drive to be designated as a growth centre or "gateway" under the NSS is bound to be nearly hysterical.
It is not just a matter of building a consensus in Irish society on the way forward, tough and all as that will be, or persuading clientelist politicians to "cast off the blinkers of local self-interest", as Mr Dempsey said yesterday; he must also convince his Cabinet colleagues.
When ministers shamelessly abuse their powers to bring State agencies into their own constituencies, what are the chances they will stomach the hard political choices that need to be made if we are to achieve regional balance, especially with a general election looming?
Nobody could doubt Mr Dempsey's personal commitment to the NSS or, indeed, to the need for root-and-branch reform of the Dail. But he has been left high and dry more than once, not least on his plan to abolish the "dual mandate", by pusillanimous political colleagues.