Ten key areas set for development over next 20 years

The Government has launched an ambitious plan which details how more than €116 billion will be spent on infrastructure projects over the next 22 years.

Here are some of the key points of the National Development Plan and National Planning Framework:

§  Athlone and Sligo identified as regional centres where economic development should be focused.

§  Letterkenny, Drogheda, and Dundalk to be prioritised as towns that will benefit from cross-border regional development.

§  Ambitious growth targets of 50% set for the cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford.

§  Development in Dublin will be focused within and close to the city.

§  500,000 new homes required up to 2040.

§  New technological university for the southeast.

§  Second runway for Dublin Airport at a cost of €320 million.

§  Regional airports such as Knock and Donegal to get increased investment.

§  Metro-link connecting Swords and Sandyford via Dublin Airport to be delivered by 2027 at cost of €3bn.

§  DART to be extended to run to Drogheda and Maynooth.

Read the full article @ www.rte.ie

Ibec welcomes Project Ireland 2040

Ibec statement on Project Ireland 2040

Ibec, the group which represents Irish business, has today welcomed the announcement of Project Ireland 2040, comprising of the National Development Plan and the National Planning Framework.

Ibec CEO, Danny McCoy, said: “The launch of Project Ireland 2040 heralds a new and exciting era for the Irish economy and society. Planning for the future is everyone’s business. We have now clearly moved beyond the economic recovery phase and can look to the next stage of development with real ambition.

“For some time now, Ibec has identified a lack of investment in the economy as a major constraint to progress. The €116bn 10 year investment plan, which will see capital spending exceed 4% of economic output, is visionary and comprehensive. Together with the National Planning Framework it will allow us to plan for a bigger population and for better distribution of economic activity across the regions.

“Our economy relies heavily on the performance of our cities and urban areas. Better functioning, sustainable, and more vibrant towns and cities will drive prosperity right across the country. It is extremely positive to see the clear identification of prioritised urban growth centres across each of the regions.

“Project Ireland 2040 will bring people and places closer together. The investment in major public transport projects, coupled with ambitious new road projects to better connect our regional cities and towns will help address our growing congestion challenges and improve our quality of life.. It is a major commitment to delivering a compact, connected and networked island of Ireland and can help offset some of the challenges of Brexit. It is now essential that all sections of society embrace the opportunity of the plan to ensure that its implementation is as successful as possible.”

Visit Ibec @ http://www.ibec.ie

Government urged not to waver from national plan

THE GOVERNMENT should continue with investments under the National Development Plan (NDP) across the entire spectrum from physical infrastructure to human capital, social infrastructure and social inclusion even if economic conditions and revenue buoyancy deteriorate, the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) has argued.

In a new report on the Irish economy in the early 21st century, NESC contends that any other approach would be to ignore the central thrust of its analysis that skills and capabilities are the most important assets in an advanced modern economy.

The report says now "is not the time to doubt the core objective of the NDP's social and economic participation programme, or to withhold the resources necessary to implement it".

It recommends two over-arching policy priorities for the Government; to fine-tune some of the strategic investments in the NDP and the national agreement Towards 2016, and to manage a difficult transition for the economy in a highly uncertain period.

It says some temptations must be avoided which would yield an inconsistent policy approach and repeat policy mistakes of past decades. These include an abandonment of fiscal discipline to have recourse to excessive borrowing for current consumption, cutting back on strategic investments in ways that would ease immediate budgetary pressures but damage long-term prosperity, and maintaining only investments in physical infrastructure.

It also warns against the most tempting but most damaging option of adopting a combination of budgetary and distributional policy that deepened the economic downturn and which ignored the degree to which non-trade employment is related to the performance of the traded sector.

NESC also proposes that in the years ahead the Government should maintain capital investment of at least 5 per cent of GNP and that overall taxation should be set at a level that is consistent with a dynamic economy and to maintain a level of expenditure adequate to support economic and social development.

"The management of the public finances should provide scope for current expenditure to invest in the services required in critical areas in Towards 2016, including making progress towards the services envisioned in [the report] Developmental Welfare State, and the delivery of the National Disability Strategy."

It suggests that the Commission on Taxation should examine the possibility of replacing stamp duty "with a more sustainable and equitable form of property tax".

The report suggests that a number of the strategic investments set out in the NDP and Towards 2016 require particular attention.

It says, in relation to early child development and childcare, it is aware of the major long-term cost that will result if the existing provision in this area proves to be "too little too late".

It also says the "effectiveness of the additional resources being given to schools to address educational disadvantage needs to be ascertained and assured".

It says the manufacturing sector is experiencing a high level of restructuring, but that high value-added functions are expanding. There is considerable potential for more research and development to be carried out in support of retaining these high-level tasks.

"Policy needs to become clearer and more adept at ensuring the maximum return to the national economy from the much-higher public spending on research and development."

NESC also says a shift in the composition of exports towards services has been beneficial, and there is considerable potential for this to continue.

The Irish Times

www.buckplanning.ie

Full text of the National Development Plan 2007-2013 "TRANSFORMING IRELAND A Better Quality of Life for All".

The full text of the NDP can be viewed at:

http://www.ndp.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=1904&mn=&nID=&UserLang=EN&StartDate=1+January+2007

Social & Affordable Housing to be a priority in the NDP

Do you believe it?

Mr. Noel Ahern T.D., Minister for Housing & Urban Renewal today (23 January 07) announced an investment programme of some €18 billion in Housing over the next seven years.

Speaking at the launch of the Social Infrastructure Priority of the NDP, the Minister said:

"An estimated 140,000 new households will have their accommodation needs met over the coming seven years. To achieve this, ambitious targets of 60,000 new units of social housing have been set and it is estimated that some 40,000 affordable homes will also be provided over the NDP period. Other households will benefit from the Rental Accommodation Scheme, under contractual arrangements with landlords for existing properties transferring from rent supplement, as well as from accommodation made available through vacancies normally arising in social housing and other social housing measures."

The investment of €18 billion, rising to €21 billion when rent allowance expenditure is taken into account, builds on the commitments agreed in Towards 2016. It is framed against the backdrop of the NESC report on Housing, acknowledging the recommendation of that report to expand the supply while maintaining an important focus on the quality of housing.

The Minister added:

"The Housing Policy Framework, launched at the end of 2005, set the building of sustainable communities as its guiding principle for our investment and this is reflected in the NDP. A new housing policy statement, due to be published in February, will provide greater detail on the actions required if the goals in the Framework document are to be achieved. The key objective in all of this is to build sustainable communities and to use resources to meet individual needs in a manner that facilitates personal choice and autonomy."

The Minister concluded:

"We are setting out a challenging but exciting vision for housing. One that is necessary to meet the needs of our growing population and to ensure that those who have affordability problems, or special housing needs, can be offered a greater range of choices to improve their position. Invariably with the launch of a seven year National Development Plan, there is a welter of statistical references in terms of investment figures, targets and outputs. But when the enormous sums of money that have been provided under the Housing Programme of this NDP are broken down, what we are about is providing homes. We will be using this investment wisely to provide choice and new opportunities for the maximum number of households."

Will the new NDP be better than the last?

Frank McDonald in The Irish Times tells how the new National Development Plan will be unveiled next week, but the current plan was a disaster, writes Frank McDonald , Environment Editor.
It is no secret that one of the key elements of the current National Development Plan (NDP) - the completion "by 2006" of motorways or dual-carriageways linking Dublin with Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and the Border, north of Dundalk - has not been realised.
It is also no secret that these roads will cost a lot more than the estimate of €5.6 billion given in the NDP when it was launched in November 1999. In fact, this "rough, ballpark, back-of-the-envelope" figure - as Seamus Brennan called it later - was a fiction from the start.
The original figure came from the National Roads Authority (NRA), but it was for something different altogether. As envisaged by its 1998 National Road Needs Study, the existing routes were to be upgraded, some to motorway standard, with bypasses built to relieve towns along the way.
But, less than 12 months later, the Cabinet sub-committee on infrastructure - consisting of Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney, Charlie McCreevy, Noel Dempsey, Mary O'Rourke and John O'Donoghue - decided to go for a motorway programme, and the NRA was told to recast its plans.
Despite this, Charlie McCreevy - then minister for finance - refused to increase the NDP allocation to reflect the likely cost of the Government's more ambitious programme. But even if the figure had been more factual, it would soon have been overtaken by construction inflation.
The cost of building roads doubled within a few years, fuelling spectacular over-runs - 92.4 per cent on the Cavan bypass (€33 million), 98.6 per cent on
the Nenagh bypass (€43 million), 117 per cent on the Drogheda bypass (€244 million), 306 per cent on the Youghal bypass (€44 million), and so on.
As a result, the estimate for completing the NDP roads programme rapidly rose to nearly €16 billion, and the Department of Finance was warned by economic consultants Fitzpatrick & Associates, in their November 2002 mid-term review, that the final bill could be €22 billion or more.
While stricter cost controls and better management have delivered more recent road projects within budget, the real issue is whether the plans currently being pursued make any sense - especially in terms of promoting the oft-repeated but elusive goal of "balanced regional development".
How can this be achieved if all of our major roads converge on Dublin (with the sole exception of the "Atlantic Corridor" mooted in Transport 21, the Government's capital investment framework for transport development)? There, they will feed into the congested M50, which will carry even heavier volumes of traffic after its €1 billion upgrade is completed in 2010.
What other country in Europe would have four motorways - the M1, M2, M3 and proposed Outer Orbital Ring road (an M50 bypass, in effect) - running virtually parallel within a corridor just 30km wide? The answer is none, mainly because planning for motorways is done more rationally elsewhere. The NDP never explicitly stated that the Government had opted for greenfield motorways, running parallel to the old national routes; this only emerged later. But had the Cabinet sub-committee examined a map of Ireland closely, it could have planned a quite different motorway network.
FOR EXAMPLE, AS former IFA president Joe Rea suggested in 2001, both Limerick and Cork could have been served by one motorway routed via north Tipperary running northeastwards to Dublin. Alternatively, a Cork-Dublin motorway could have been routed east to serve Waterford on the way.
Either of these options would have been much cheaper, and would have done more to promote regional development by providing a high-quality route between two of the smaller cities. But nobody who made the fateful decision to go for a radial motorway network ever thought so laterally.
As James Nix and I showed in our book, Chaos at the Crossroads, ministers had no real evidence on which to base this decision. It was grounded on the dubious assumption that the best way to grow regional cities at a faster rate than Dublin is to ensure better access to and from Dublin.
Radial motorways will simply reinforce Ireland's east coast-loaded regional imbalance. In Germany, by contrast, road planners have prevented the development of a "hub and spoke" motorway network because they realise that its centralising effects would be almost impossible to counter.Entirely new greenfield motorways, consuming thousands of acres of farmland, were chosen here because it would have been too controversial to compulsorily
acquire and demolish hundreds of one-off houses strung out along existing national routes, so that they could be widened.
In May 2002, Noel Dempsey warned that up to 1,500 homes would have to be demolished to improve existing national routes along the lines proposed by the NRA's Road Needs Study. "What we're trying to do is to get value for money by long-term planning", he said at the time.
BUT THE GOVERNMENT'S planning for motorways takes no account of wider environmental implications, notably the car-dependent sprawl they would inevitably promote and the rise in road transport's carbon dioxide emissions, which are up by 144 per cent - the highest for any sector.
Just this week, Minister for Transport Martin Cullen announced an allocation of €1.53 billion for NRA projects in 2007, which works out at €4 million-plus per day. The effect of all this spending on roads will lock us into car dependency at a time when global oil production is about to peak.
It is also a myth that the motorways are needed to cater for long-distance traffic. Roads may account for 96 per cent of all passenger traffic in the State, but the overwhelming majority of these trips are relatively short hops, typically for commuting, rather than long journeys from city to city. This was confirmed by a survey carried out by Scetauroute, a French toll consulting company, for the NRA's National Road Needs Study; it found that the number of vehicles travelling the full distance of a national route was low; the highest was just 1,700 per day between Dublin and Cork.
Yet, over the past seven years, massive investment in new roads outstripped public transport by a ratio of four to one. Indeed, some of the rail projects - such as four-tracking the Kildare line to separate commuter and mainline services - were dusted down to reappear in Transport 21.
On the last page of the NDP, an appendix conceded that "some unsustainable patterns of development" could emerge within its framework, as a result of "the pace of current economic development, unforeseen interaction between measures, or [ other] unanticipated consequences".
That's the classic get-out clause by a laissez-faire Government whose greatest single legacy is car-dependent sprawl.

Not published yet, but there are already complaints about the cost of the new NDP

Cliff taylor in the Sunday Business Post writes:

A major government economic plan, to be published next week, will outline proposals to spend more than €175 billion over the next seven years.

The money will be spent on roads, public transport, research, training and a range of social programmes. Among the key commitments will be 100,000 new social and affordable homes and 50,000 new childcare places.

Minister for Finance Brian Cowen will outline the National Development Plan (NDP) 2007-2013 on Tuesday, January 23, in the most far ranging economic programme ever outlined by an Irish government.

The largest single amount of money - likely to exceed €50 billion - will go towards economic infrastructure such as roads and public transport, energy and broadband.

Further significant amounts will be spent on enterprise and science, training and social infrastructure, including social and affordable houses and new prisons and courthouses.

Previous programmes have only dealt with investment spending, but for the first time the new NDP will include a seven-year programme for day-to-day spending in key social areas such as childcare services, support for older people and the disabled and programmes to promote immigrant integration.

These will be required to improve services and deal with a population that is likely to rise to more than five million over the next decade. The government hopes the plan, coming months before the election, will give the coalition an extra boost before polling day.

Total state investment spending under the programme will come to more than €75 billion.

Together with substantial investment by state bodies such as the ESB and the private sector and some €50 billion in day-to-day spending on total programmes, this will bring total spending on all elements of the plan to more than €175 billion, outlining significant amounts of the state spending programme for the next seven years. This represents a major departure from the current method of allocating money on a year-to-year basis in each budget.

The plan will say that funding the programme will depend on a continuation of strong economic growth, which it expects will run at 4 per cent plus on average each year.

As well as carrying through the €34 billion Transport 21 plan published last year, the government will present the document as addressing key ‘‘quality-of-life’’ issues.

It will promise to accelerate investment in schools, particularly in fast-growing areas where there is a shortage of places and to tackle youth disadvantage.

For the elderly it will outline a multi-year programme to increase supports for those staying at home as well as investing in nursing home facilities. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has found that investments under previous plans have generated a strong return.

However, the government is choosing to ignore advice from the ESRI that it should cut back on investment spending over the next couple of years, particularly in areas such as social housing, as it could get better value when growth rates cool.

Among the key targets of the plan will be a major training programme for those in work overseen by FAS and heavy investment in third level education facilities.