This Fine Gael Private Members' motion is the only opportunity afforded to the Members of this Dáil to contribute to a debate on the national spatial strategy, decentralisation of Government Departments and other related matters. It provides an opportunity to test how the Government intends to implement the policies already announced and how it has reneged on its commitments since it took office one year ago and over the longer period of its previous five years in Government.
A number of basic factual points need to be addressed at the outset. The 2002 census of population shows that there are 3,917,336 persons living in Ireland now, compared to 3,626,087 in 1996. This is an 8% increase in six years. While the census report shows that the population in Dublin increased at a lower rate than the national average, there was an explosion in the commuter belt serving Dublin. The Lucan-Esker area trebled its population and there was a 61.9% increase in the population of the Blanchardstown-Blakestown area. Castleknock, Swords, Tallaght, Glencullen and Firhouse village experienced dramatic population increases in that six years. However, there was a 20% or more increase in population since 1996 in counties Kildare and Meath. Westmeath's population increased by 13.8% and Wexford's by 11.7% while the populations of Laois, Louth and Carlow also increased substantially, reflecting a widening of the Dublin commuter belt beyond Meath, Kildare and Wicklow.
It is now estimated that more than 2.2 million people reside in what could be described as the Dublin commuter belt on the east coast. However, the 2002 census shows that the population decreased in several district electoral divisions of the Glenamaddy rural area of County Galway. Ballinakill lost 14% of its population between 1996 and 2002 while in the same area, Kiltullagh lost 6.2%, Templetogher lost 14% and Shankill lost 7.9%. These figures clearly show a huge imbalance of population. Even if there were a static national population base over the next six years, the normal growth dynamic of a population of that size would ensure a continual steady rise in population on the east coast. For all other regions, with the possible exception of Galway city, no such dynamic is at work. Unless sensible, workable, well researched strategies are put in place, therefore, there will be an even bigger widening of the gap in the population structure in six years' time.
It is interesting to note that while all counties experienced inward migration between 1996 and 2002 it was again the counties of Meath, Kildare, Westmeath, Wexford and Laois that showed the biggest increases. In other words, these are the real growth areas for population increases and no doubt such huge increases in population contribute to the chaos that is Dublin city traffic. Ireland is regarded as one of the most centralised countries in Europe with no country with a similar population having so great a population residing in such a concentrated area. Can anything be done to slow down the population increase on the east coast and, at the same time, breathe new life and vitality into the regions, irrespective of how far away they are from Dublin?
The feeble efforts of Fianna Fáil over the past 20 years have certainly not been successful. This country, for example, did not have a spatial strategy debate from 1966 until this year when the Government announced its gateway and hub towns. These, we are told, will receive priority infrastructural investment together with industrial development, housing and the other amenities needed to grow a population centre. What does the Government have in mind for decentralisation of Government Departments? I consistently ask both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste in the Dáil when this decision will be announced. I constantly get "in the near future" as a reply.
I believe a war is taking place inside the Cabinet, with Ministers obviously sulking in the knowledge that their county towns may be omitted. Certainly, the Government backbenchers are on overtime. I call on the Government to produce a blueprint for decentralisation providing the public with clear, unambiguous, transparent eligibility guidelines on which towns, cities and regions may be entitled to get a decentralised Government Department. I ask the Minister to outline how many Departments he has in mind for decentralisation and what sort of negotiations he has had with the various unions involved about this so-called major transfer of civil servants from Dublin to the country. The Tánaiste informed me at a meeting in her Department some months ago that gateway or hub towns already identified in the national spatial strategy plan would not get a decentralised Government Department.
This Government and its predecessor were clearly Dublin-orientated in that the vast bulk of the infrastructural investment in roads, railways and transport went to the capital city. It is true that all areas benefited from the Celtic tiger but a few examples show how the areas outside the Dublin commuter belt were left out in the cold. Take, for example, the National Roads Authority allocations to local authorities for 2003. The schemes are the N1 in Dundalk, the Carrickmacross bypass, the Kilcock bypass, the Monasterevin bypass, the Naas Road, the Cashel bypass and the Waterford city bypass. Only one of them is in the BMW area. There appears to be more trouble in store for areas in the west and north-west where grandiose preferred road routes have been identified. These projects are dropping fast to the back of the queue. Look at the National Development Plan 2000-2006. It now appears that the projects situated far from Dublin will not be completed until 2016, possibly ten years later than planned.
We are told that the financing of the Dublin Port tunnel, when completed, will have major implications for other schemes in the country in that there may well be more money available for projects outside Dublin. However, will there be sufficient funding for those projects even then? It seems to be a fait accompli that public-private partnerships will be established to build most of the motorways. The higher the volume of cars going through the toll plazas, the more profit they will make and the nearer they are to Dublin, the better the profit will be. Should private enterprise not be interested in road building, many parts of the country such as Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo, Leitrim and parts of Galway may be shunted to one side and their roads may never be completed.
I want to take the opportunity to give a balanced overview of where people work and live, and how they get to their work; how one part of the country is overcrowded and the remainder is sparsely populated and starved of infrastructural development. In many cases the population base is so fragile that the ratio of births to deaths is a negative factor. For a national spatial strategy to work properly it must address all the factors that influenced the huge unmanaged growth in Dublin and on the east coast. At the same time in complementary terms it must provide a framework, a vision, an energy and an enthusiasm to introduce strategies to stabilise decreasing populations and to plan for viable towns and cities to counterbalance the growth of the east coast.
For daily commuters travelling long or short distances to work in this city every day, their only hope lies in a combination of better transport access by road, whether by bus or private car, rail, Luas, using park and ride facilities and then by the relocation of the 10,000 existing commuters away from the city to different centres around the country. This Government is in flagrant breach of a solemn commitment given before the last general election by the Minister for Finance who stated that 10,000 civil servants would be relocated. Deputy Harney told me on several occasions in this House that an announcement to this effect was imminent.
What would 10,000 civil servants relocated from Dublin mean for Dublin? Everybody knows what it would mean for the regions. In Dublin the Minister refers to three Luas systems being cleared in one swoop and said it takes 165 buses morning and evening, with 60 people in each, to convey those 10,000 commuters to their work in Dublin every day. The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Harney, and the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Parlon, aired the decentralisation theme at their party's annual conference a few weeks ago. The Minister told worried community leaders and the 300 workers at the ill-fated Square D factory in Ballinasloe that the Government was urgently working on plans to decentralise Departments and that an announcement in their favour would be made shortly. That was three months ago but in his Dáil reply last week the Minister for Finance seems to have gone cold on the idea. He has to deal with a plethora of confrontations despite the fact that he has had since 1999 to do that.
I put it to the Minister for Defence that there is a serious row going on in the Cabinet. It is not able to agree where to send the civil servants because it does not have a blueprint for where they should go. When the Minister speaks in this debate I want him to refer to the 120 applications he has from cities, villages and towns made at great cost to themselves. They genuinely believed their best hope was to get some part of a decentralised Department. I put it to the Minister and his Government that they cannot slide out of this promise. They cannot blame, for instance, overseas investors who may or may not want to come to the BMW region. Right or wrong that is what the Minister says. The Minister is in control of the decentralisation programme. He said he was going to shift 10,000 civil servants. He has done almost nothing. The plan is stillborn and is not going to happen.
If the current demographic trends continue, even on a modest economic growth pattern, Ireland is likely to have 4.4 million people in 20 years or about 500,000 people more than at present. This will happen without any of the significant net migration into the country that we have experienced over the past four or five years. Parallel with this population increase we can expect an explosion in car ownership. It now looks as if the number of cars using our roads will double over the period to 2016. There were 1.1 million cars in 1996 and we are told there will be 2.2 million in 2016.
