More than 30 years ago a renowned English planning expert attempted to chart a course for regional development in Ireland by proposing alternative growth centres to Dublin. But Prof Colin Buchanan's 1969 report ended up being pigeonholed, largely due to the failings of our clientelist political system.
Since clientelism requires that there must be "something for everyone in the audience", the Fianna Fail government of the day could not bring itself to designate new growth centres. By announcing that, say, Athlone would grow clearly implied that Mullingar and Ballinasloe would not, and that was not politically palatable.
Three decades after Buchanan we are having another go at it. As a follow-on to the £40 billion National Development Plan, the Department of the Environment is drafting a National Spatial Strategy which will "set out a scenario for the future role of Irish cities and towns and promote a small number of new strategic regional centres".
The team preparing this strategy is holed up on the top floor of the Custom House. Headed by principal officer Finian Matthews, the team consists of four planners.
Since they started work a year ago 22 research studies have been carried out or commissioned, generating a huge volume of data. In the meantime, as this important groundwork proceeds, horror stories accumulate week by week about staggering plans for inappropriate developments of all types - a power station here, a huge housing estate there, a "holiday village" somewhere else. Driven by the current economic boom, everything seems to be "up for grabs".
The key question is whether the planners can put some shape on it all. But first they intend to generate a much-needed public debate by publishing a package of data in April or May, which will include a variety of options.
What will be on the table at that stage is "a comprehensive catalogue of how the country functions spatially - where we've come from, where we stand now and where we are heading", according to Niall Cussen, the team's senior planner. After a period of public debate, the intention is to produce a strategy by the end of this year.
The starting point is the Government's objective to achieve "balanced regional development" under the National Development Plan. But this is easier said than done, especially with unprecedented boom-led immigration which, if it continues, could mean having to cater for an extra 1.5 million people, rather than just 800,000, by 2020.
Where these people live and work is the crucial issue. At present 40 per cent of the State's population resides in the Greater Dublin Area, which includes Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. With no change in existing trends, up to 70 per cent of anticipated population growth could happen in the GDA, pushing its share of the State's total to 43 per cent.
That's because only Dublin has developed a critical mass in European terms. It is Ireland's principal gateway, hub of the transport network and a national centre of learning that has been draining brains from the rest of the State for decades. "Every region is a net exporter of brains to Dublin, and they don't tend to go back," as Mr Cussen put it.
"If you look at any indicator - population growth, inward investment, transport networks - Dublin is in a different league. It has become a crucible. What we're trying to do is to understand the mechanics of that and of other successful places like Galway to see if the conditions for doing business can be created elsewhere," he said.
If whatever it is that "drives" Dublin could be replicated in other places on a smaller scale, this would not only relieve intense pressure on the capital but also promote more balanced regional development. That does not necessarily mean that growth in Dublin has to stop; the issue is about how the city grows in a national context.
But if successful counterbalances are to be created, the colonisation of towns and villages throughout Leinster by Dublin commuters will obviously have to be tackled. And the planners in the Custom House will also have to revisit the Strategic Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area to see if they fit in with the national strategy.The "pull" effect of Dublin and of the Dublin-Belfast economic corridor may be so powerful it could prove almost impossible to strike a better balance between east and west. Even as it is, the most significant growth areas in the BMW (Border-Midlands-Western) region are Galway and Dublin-dependent outer Leinster counties. "Large cities exert powerful magnetic fields through their hinterlands. Improving transport links, be they road or rail, increases the power of the magnetic field and makes it larger," says economist Colm McCarthy. As a result, "the odds are stacked against development of significant, independent new urban centres in the immediate vicinity of Dublin". If we are to create alternative self-contained growth centres as "counter-magnets", Mr McCarthy believes that none of them can be in Leinster because of the risk that they would become car-dependent dormitories for Dublin. "What has been achieved in Galway over the last two decades can be repeated in Sligo, Waterford and elsewhere," he said.There are barriers, however. The electricity grid is simply not capable of accommodating growth in large parts of the west, not just to support firms making socks but, more importantly, inward investors involved in information technology. Other missing "hardware" elements include gas pipelines, transport and broadband networks.What the planners are trying to create is a "bundle" of hardware (road or rail links, electricity lines etc) and software (human resources, ambience etc) to inspire confidence among companies that they could do business in designated growth centres and that the type of staff they are seeking, in a knowledge-based economy, will be there. It is improbable that madcap schemes for new towns, still less new cities, will form part of the mix; instead, growth is to be targeted at existing cities and a selection of major towns with a good geographical spread. Limerick, for example, could expand along the four railway lines that run into it, on which there is currently not a single commuter train.And although it would make sense to take an all-Ireland view, as the Labour Party recently suggested, the spatial strategy that emanates from the Custom House will be confined to the Republic, apart from pointing to possible areas of cross-Border co-ordination. The North, in any case, already has its own strategy.The strategy now being drafted for the Republic - to be adopted by the Government probably before the end of this year - may be coming too late to avert much of the planning chaos south of the Border. But whether it succeeds where Prof Buchanan failed will depend on the extent to which every sector buys into it, notably the State's political leaders.