A nightmare scenario for Dublin in 2016 looms, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
In 1999, the Greater Dublin Area (GDA) was given its first set of Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs), which aimed to consolidate growth of the metropolitan area and concentrate future development of its hinterland in a number of "self-sustaining" major centres.
Quite obviously, neither of these objectives has been achieved. The draft revised SPGs published yesterday concede that there has been "an imbalance" in the growth of the GDA, with much of it taking place in Meath, Kildare and Wicklow rather than in and around Dublin.
Inevitably, this "migration" of population in search of affordable housing in the city's hinterland, while most of the jobs remain concentrated in the metropolitan area, has resulted in a huge increase in long-distance commuting by car from far-flung parts of the GDA. The draft doesn't even mention the huge overspill of population into a vastly-extended commuter belt within a 50- or 60-mile radius, other than acknowledging that the GDA had "net losses to most counties" due to out-migration. That's a matter for others to deal with.
No attempt was made by the authors to quantify this trend, as they might have done from the 2002 Census figures. Yet the fact that a good deal of Dublin's population growth is happening outside the GDA makes it even more difficult to consolidate the metropolitan area.
If current trends persist, as the draft acknowledges, jobs will continue to be predominantly located in and around Dublin, while the population of the hinterland area will grow, increasing the amount of commuting and congestion and making public transport difficult.
Its nightmare scenario for 2016 envisages that some of the GDA's countryside will resemble an ultra-low density suburb, that designated urban areas will not be as fully developed as planned and that there will be difficulties in managing "increasingly polluted" water resources. Furthermore, jobs will remain relatively concentrated in the metropolitan area, while its hinterland's population growth could soar, leading to yet more car-commuting and congestion while at the same time making public transport services enviable.
As the authors say, "it is clear that if current trends continue in the future, then the area will fail, perhaps quite badly" to meet the goals and objectives set out in 1999. So what they are putting forward is a blueprint to develop the GDA as a sustainable, European-style "city region".
But the objective of stemming Dublin's dispersal is based on an assumption that the SPGs, the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) and the Dublin Transportation Office's Platform for Change policy will all be implemented. And there is no indication that this will actually happen.
For a start, the original SPGs turned out to be notional. All the draft says about that is that the GDA's local authorities "had regard to" their contents and that the Department of the Environment "commented on certain aspects" of their development plans - without much effect.
As for the NSS, the Government effectively abandoned it on Budget Day with its scatter-gun approach to "decentralisation". Of the eight departments that are to be moved to provincial locations, only one is targeted for a "gateway" town.
With such a terrible headline set by the Government itself, why should local authorities bother to pay any attention to the NSS or the SPGs? They, too, might as well grab what they can - and there is nothing to stop them, because the regional planning guidelines are only advisory.
And though the draft identifies an underground link between Heuston and the city centre as a "vital project", it concedes that the DTO strategy "will need to be reviewed in the light of ... current and projected budgetary and economic conditions". In other words, it may not happen at all.
Given all of these caveats, as well as what has happened on the ground over the past four years, it is much more likely that the nightmare scenario for Dublin in 2016 will be realised than the latest set of aspirational plans.