It would be premature to abandon the National Spacial Strategy (NSS), Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said today.
Speaking at a conference on planning in Sligo today, Mr Roche said he was "satisfied" the strategy had "sufficient robustness and flexibility to cater for our rapidly growing population, which is expected to grow to around five million by 2020".
He added "The NSS, when published, recognised this possibility."
Mr Roche's comments were prompted by a call yesterday for the 2002 NSS to be scrapped.
Henk van der Kamp, president of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), said the Government should draw up a new blueprint for regional development to cater for the projected population rises.
He said Ireland was growing so fast that there was now a possibility of returning close to the population of eight million it had before the Famine.
"If the growth anticipation is correct, we need to be prepared for a more radical change in the Irish scale and pattern of development than we are used to from the past, and be prepared for more radical planning solutions," he told the IPI's annual conference yesterday.
These would include moving away from building semi-detached houses at low to medium densities, from expecting everyone to have a car or two parked in front of their house and from ignoring the potential of solar energy in housing design.
Mr van der Kamp said the new optimistic projections by NCB stockbrokers among others underlined the fact that the current spatial strategy was "out of date" and needed to be recast.
