Environment

Boycott campaign derides organic standards for farmed salmon

Strategic spatial planning determines where development should take place in Ireland. It can improve the quality of life, improve society and the environment and underpin the delivery of effective public services and the capacity for economic growth at national, regional and subregional levels. In other words it decides where we live, work and play – and so crystallises much about our way of life. Because of demographics and development -pressure spatial planning, or the lack of it, is setting in concrete our living conditions for several generations. A new National Planning Framework (NPF) is being prepared for Ireland to succeed the National Spatial Strategy 2002 (NSS). The NSS failed abysmally and was officially scrapped in February 2013. The new framework is due to be published in the first quarter of 2017 depending on its adoption by the Oireachtas and relevant statutory requirements. The Department for Housing, Planning and Local Government published a roadmap for its preparation last December. Before we get stuck in to this, the first question must be: why did the NSS fail and what are the lessons? What was the National Spatial Strategy? The NSS was Ireland’s first national strategic spatial and territorial planning framework and was held up as, theoretically, the best in Europe at the time. The strategy was a twenty-year planning framework designed to deliver more balanced social, economic and physical development between regions. The NSS was to provide a response to the growing imbalances in socio-economic development that occurred during the Celtic Tiger period in the late 1990s. In the foreword, An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, states that to achieve “balanced regional development” a greater share of economic activity must take place outside the Greater Dublin Area. It requires that the full potential of each region to contribute to the overall performance of the State be developed in a sustainable economic, social and environmental basis. To achieve this the National Spatial Strategy set out a framework for gateways, hubs and other urban and rural areas to act together. In 1969 the Buchanan Report was published advocating the concentration of industrial development within ‘growth centres’ comprising, in addition to Dublin, two national growth centres in Cork and Limerick-Shannon; six regional growth centres in Athlone, Drogheda, Dundalk, Galway, Sligo and Waterford; and a further four local-growth centres in Castlebar, Cavan, Letterkenny and Tralee. This proposal proved highly controversial and wasn’t implemented, dying a death by inertia. Zones, Hubs and Gateways The NSS emerged more than 30 years later, proposing the classification of 18 cities and towns, and their associated hinterlands as ‘gateways’ and ‘hubs’. While this is similar to the approach advocated in the Buchanan Report, the NSS differs as it encompassed a greater number of places and conceptualised spatial development within a hierarchical framework of networked places, including the gateways and hubs, as well as ‘other towns’, ‘other places’ and ‘rural areas’ . The plan divided the country into five zones; Consolidating the Greater Dublin Area Strengthening the South, South East, West and North West to complement Dublin Revitalising the West and South West Reinforcing central parts of Ireland and the South East Co-operating in an all-island context The Gateways were: Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick/Shannon, Waterford, Dundalk, Sligo, and two linked Gateways Letterkenny/Derry, Athlone/Tullamore/Mullingar. The Gateways were to have populations of more than 100,000 providing “critical mass necessary to sustain strong levels of job growth in the regions”. There were nine strategically located, medium sized Hubs supported by the Gateways: Cavan, Ennis, Kilkenny, Mallow, Monaghan, Tuam and Wexford. Ballina/Castlebar and Tralee/Killarney would act as “linked hubs”. Hubs were to have population of 20-40,000 and provide localised critical mass and ‘link the capabilities of the Gateways to other areas”. Unfortunately key policy and political stakeholders rejected the concept of gateways and hubs as urban-centric and detrimental to the development of rural areas. It would turn out that the concept of rural development was largely limited to enabling residential housing construction in rural areas rather than a broader conceptualisation encompassing social or economic dimensions. The debate which followed the NSS reflected in many ways the one that had followed the Buchanan Report. Crucially the National Spatial Strategy after 2002 imported its own inertia, that of non-implementation. The Strategy had no teeth. So-called implementing guidelines such as the “Strategic Policy Guidelines” were deliberately made non-mandatory by governments viscerally antagonistic to central planning, and were duly flouted in local authority development plans, and more particularly the planning permissions that were to derive from them. It lacked teeth but it also crucially lacked a timetable and dedicated funding. Despite its feebleness it generated such a backlash that alternative measures were introduced, most notably Charlie McCreevy’s ‘surprise’ policy of “decentralisation”, actively discouraging concentrations and emphasising dispersal of industrial investment. This Department of Finance sponsored initiative ignored over half of the NSS-nominated Gateway and Hub settlements in favour of a broad, ostensibly populist ‘pepper-spread’. At the time An Taisce identified obvious flaws in the NSS and proposed comprehensively that: “Good planning policy must be guided by principles of sustainability and the minimisation of resource use. In general these factors conduce to consolidation and sensitive development of existing villages, towns and cities which tend to have economic, social and cultural infrastructure; and be well served by public transportation. It is not possible or wise to suppress housing demand but the model of predict and provide that is currently being implemented on the ground in the Greater Dublin Area and to too great an extent was enshrined more generally in the last spatial strategy, has not served the common good. There are significant social disbenefits from continuing growth of Dublin. These include congestion in Dublin and the opportunity cost of failing to staunch rural depopulation. For these inert projections of a rise in the proportion of the country’s population that lives in Dublin are dangerous. Nor is any significant increase in the mid-east (Kildare, Wicklow and Meath) since development of this area more than any in the country conduces to car-dependent sprawl. More

Scottish Woodlands ravages Castleforbes woodlands in Longford, with impunity from ineffectual Forest Services, Parks and Wildlife Service and government

The climate crisis is here, now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn’t want to know.

Time for consensual but disciplined balanced regional development through a long-delayed new National Planning Framework

The climate crisis is here, now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn’t want to know

The NPWS report made no mention of the licence restrictions to firewood, or of the prohibition on removal of oaks. It never referred the fellings to the Forest Service, the licensing authorit