The Strategic Planning Guidelines may have been effectively set aside by the counties around Dublin, but the outcome is far from finalised, according to planning activists.

An Taisce's challenge to the Meath County Development Plan is currently in the courts because of what An Taisce alleges is that county's planning for an additional 70,000 people.

In Kildare a similar challenge is being considered because of the enthusiasm of the county council for housing development in the north east of the county which principally facilitates Dublin residents.

The development plan breaches the guidelines by at least 24,000 people, according to An Taisce's Michael Smith.

In Co Wicklow the arguments about what exactly is meant by "local needs" appears to have assumed Jesuitical proportions, varying far from a projected increase in the population of a local community.

Now An Taisce has warned that these counties may be leaving themselves open to an "outbreak" of compensation cases should a property developer find himself in possession of zoned land which he is prohibited from developing.

While councillors in these counties have pointed to the shortage of housing in Dublin the Dublin City Manager Mr John Fitzgerald has said the housing crisis in Dublin should be solved in Dublin.

The idea of a low-rise city stretching 50 miles out into surrounding counties has been discredited and An Bord Pleanalβ, which has to have regard to regional and state planning guidelines, may well accept the view that developing large suburban housing estates in the greenbelt hinterland area is not good policy.

While some members of councils in the greater Dublin area have muttered darkly that it is "Trotskyite" to rule on where people may live, in fact European countries have been ruling on it for decades. The process is called land use planning.

Ms Deirdre de Burca, a member of Wicklow County Council, told a conference on planning in Enfield, Co Meath, last week that limits initially agreed for 2016 in the 1999 Wicklow County Development Plan may be reached instead by the year 2006.

"A majority of councillors supported concentrating all development into a five year period rather than phasing it out over 15 years as originally planned. Local communities in Newtown and Kilcoole were outraged and expressed particular concern that the already inadequate physical and social infrastructure in those villages would be completely overwhelmed by the intensive development anticipated.

After a sustained campaign of public protest, the draft plans for the villages of Kilcoole and Newtown have since been reviewed and modified by the council. Yet Michael Smith from An Taisce says developers may still be put in an invidious position as the council has capped the population but at the same time zoned sufficient land to exceed those population caps.

The council's logic is that the infrastructure may not be in place in some areas to allow development to go ahead, and so other areas will be allowed to take up the capacity.

The council voted to cap the population of the county at 144,000 up to 2016, an increase of 42,000 on the 1996 figure.

The council also voted to cap the combined total population of the 14 local growth centres in the hinterland at 27,500, and the remainder of the new development is to occur in the designated growth centres of Arklow and Wicklow.

On the face of it this would allow for necessary flexibility.

But as the recently adopted Ashford local area plan will accommodate at least four times the 1996 population, and given that this same approach has been pursued in relation to other recently adopted local area plans, it seems clear that Wicklow will reach the 27,500 population cap for local growth centres long before development can start in other villages.

The implication that the population target for the county might be reached before some developers have developed their land has obvious consequences.

But there are other consequences, Councillor de Burca told the conference. "Right across County Wicklow, and more recently particularly towards the south of the county, there are examples of poorly designed suburban estates tacked on to rural villages which do nothing to assist the development of a rural economy but rather continue to provide for a commuting population that largely works in Dublin," she argued.

One solution suggested by the councillor was to give Strategic Planning Guidelines "proper teeth" so that they take precedence over a local authority development plan.

However as Michael Smith points out, An Bord Pleanalβ may take that view anyway. And then it may be the taxpayer who picks up the bill.