There are serious spatial development problems in this country. The Minister is long enough around these Houses to recognise that, and he should recognise it. A demographic change that has accelerated in recent years has been one of population moving from the west coast to the east coast. Currently, 40% of the population lives in the greater Dublin area. The GAA did a very good report recently on the demographic problem we are hitting. Two thirds of the population of the country, North and South, live in a very narrow band along the east coast. Most university-level jobs are being located in Dublin. Young people have to move to Dublin to work in those jobs but, obviously, Dublin is too expensive. They cannot afford to live in the city, so they end up living 40 km, 50 km and 60 km away in a commuter hell as they try to hold down those jobs. That commuter hell is obviously bad for their lives. Spending two or three hours daily in a car is bad for mental and physical health. For people with a young family, it hurts the children they do not get to see and creates anxiety for them. It hurts the community because those people do not get home until 8 o'clock in the evening, which means it is too late for them to be able to volunteer in their football, soccer and rugby clubs. People are commuting from Ulster, Connacht and Munster into Dublin on a daily basis. Disastrous, lopsided, city-state spatial development is happening under this Government, with absolutely nothing being done to mitigate it or push against it. While this is happening, it is not good for Dublin. Dublin is becoming more congested, with people having less access to housing and education. Transport facilities are becoming harder to access while, at the same time, schools are being closed in rural and regional Ireland, which is emptying out its young people. The average age of the population in Killarney is now ten years higher than the average age of the population in Balbriggan. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy because the energy of development usually happens with the youth and because regional and rural Ireland is missing its youth, it is also missing that development. Some 50% of the State's total income tax revenue is spent in the Dublin area. The vast majority of foreign direct investment is going to the greater Dublin area. There are significant problems. Ireland is an outlier here. Many people will say that London is too big for the rest of the economy, but 40% of the Irish population live in Dublin whereas about 20% of the British population live in London. We are an outlier, in European terms, with regard to how horrendously lopsided we are as a country. What is the Government's response to that? Its response to the water pressures in Dublin is to spend billions of euro to take water out of the Parteen Basin and bring it up to Dublin. Most logical and spatially aware Governments would say we should develop the Limerick region and get the population into the region where that natural resource is located. The same is happening in regard to airports. Today, tens of thousands of people will have left areas right next door to another airport to travel three or four hours to Dublin Airport. Some 40% of the people who land in Dublin daily travel west, where there are other airports. Shannon Airport can take 5 million passengers. The current number is not even half that. Cork Airport could take another 2 million passengers and Knock Airport could take another 500,000 passengers. There is massive spare capacity in these airports, and using it would cause no difficulty at all. Putting all your eggs in one basket is dangerous in terms of exposure for transport. All of us can remember the images of the fuel protests when the M50 was blocked. We saw people having to walk, pulling their travel bags behind them, up a motorway to try to get to the airport. Making sure all of the growth happens in Dublin at the expense of the regional airports also creates a problem. There is no contingency plan for Dublin as a result of this. I will touch briefly on the issue of noise, which is having a massive impact on the towns and villages in north Dublin and south-east Meath that surround Dublin Airport. The airport is currently in breach of planning permissions that were put in place to protect people. That is wrong. The guidelines on this are not being implemented. The DAA has been given eight warning letters and two enforcement notices and is still not responding to this. There are 65 flights at night-time. Places like St. Margaret's are dying. The IAA is not doing the necessary assessment on the two runways working in unison. We want to be accessible to the rest of the world. As an island nation, we need accessibility but I plead with the Minister to start to inject proper spatial development into his plans. There is then the issue of carbon emissions. Telling people to make sure there is less water in the kettle before boiling it and turn off the lights, while, at the same time, pushing up this cap and putting so many data centres in the country makes a mockery of the Government's ask that people cut back their own emissions.

Sentiment score: -0.11