Think back to 10 years ago when the St Stephen's Green Centre was being built in the centre of Dublin. One of the main concerns then - which seems difficult to believe now - was that it might provide too much retail space in the city centre. Could all that space be used? Would it be a shopping centre too far?

Looking back now such questions seem almost quaint. The St Stephen's Green Centre has been hugely successful and, literally, millions more square feet of retail space have been added to the greater Dublin area since then.

Which begs the question, have we reached the limit now? Are some of the new or planned shopping areas going to prove to be a shopping centre too far?

The short answer to both questions is "no": we have not reached the limit of what the market can bear and, barring unforeseeable international economic crises, it is unlikely that we have reached the point where we have too much retail space.

That is not to say that all centres will be automatically and immediately successful, as the sluggish start to Liffey Valley has demonstrated.

The underlying trend, however, points to more and more retail space being required around Dublin. International statistics prove the point which can be summarised, crudely, as showing that the richer a society becomes the more retail space it requires and can support.

The main difference between 10 years ago, when we worried about the St Stephen's Green Centre providing too much shopping space, and now, is the Celtic Tiger. Rapid economic growth for most of the 1990s has transformed this area of Irish life as much, if not more, than any other.

Looking at the international comparison charts, though, suggests that we have some way still to go. If one looks at statistics, like those for GDP per person or private consumption, on the one hand, and the number of people per retail business on the other, a clear correlation is noticeable. The richer the country, the more people there are per retailer: in other words, there are probably fewer and bigger retailers in richer countries.

Ireland is highly placed on charts of GDP per capita, up with the smaller Northern European and Scandinavian countries which tend to dominate such charts and ahead of Germany, France and the UK. On the more meaningful comparison of private consumption per capita, however, we fall behind both groups. According to figures from the Economist Intelligence Unit, for instance, private consumption per person in Ireland was $11,806 last year compared to $15,190 in the UK.

That indicates that we still have some way to go in catching up on our neighbours. Another chart which illustrates a similar point is one by Jones Lang LaSalle which measures the amount of shopping centre floorspace per thousand people throughout different European countries.

The Scandinavian countries head the list, with Norway having 413 sq m and Sweden 371 sq m. The Irish ratio is 204.9 sq m per thousand people. Allowance may need to be made in such comparisons for climate and other local factors in Scandinavia, so a comparison with the UK is more relevant to us. It has 230.8 sq m of shopping centre floorspace per thousand people, which indicates that we have some way to go in this respect as well.

What these statistics indicate is that Ireland is not as over-supplied with retail space as some may think when reviewing the rate of development that has occurred in recent years, especially around the M50. What they also suggest, if we go the way of our neighbours, is that we will have more square feet in retail floor space but, possibly, a smaller number of stores.

Coping with economic success has prompted people to start looking at developments in different ways. One increasingly hears commentators and experts putting the extraordinary growth of the economy in recent years in the context of the economic disappointments of the last century or two. In such a context, the growth is not so spectacular, nor has it continued for very long so far.

Perhaps we also need to change the context of the way we look at retail developments. Instead of worrying, as we did 10 years ago, about whether one more shopping centre would be too much in relation to existing capacity, perhaps we should look towards raising our facilities to the same level as those countries to whose level of wealth we aspire.

On that basis, we still have some way to go in developing our retail infrastructure.

Stephen Murray is retail agency director of Jones Lang LaSalle in Dublin.