Dubliners are invading surrounding counties, with disastrous results, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Dublin is all over the place these days. With its entrails spilling out into Leinster, the city's commuter belt extends from Dundalk to Gorey and as far inland as Athlone. At the rate things are going, as architect Tony Reddy has warned, Dublin will occupy a land area equivalent to Los Angeles but with less than a quarter of its population.
Some of the most dramatic increases in population recorded by the 2002 Census were in counties Meath (up 22.1 per cent since 1996), Kildare (up 21.5 per cent), Westmeath (up 13.8 per cent), Wicklow (up 11.7 per cent), Wexford (up 11.7 per cent), Laois (up 10.9 per cent), Louth (up 10.5 per cent) and Carlow (up 10.2 per cent).
Even the National Spatial Strategy, which has little to say about this phenomenon, concedes growth is now happening at a faster rate in the counties surrounding the capital than in Dublin itself. The increases in their population, it notes, "confirm a widening of the Dublin commuter belt well beyond the Greater Dublin Area".
Few could doubt that much of this unplanned growth has been generated by Dubliners fleeing exorbitantly high property prices in the city and its immediate environs; the prospect of getting their hands on houses at relatively affordable prices, even in places they had barely heard of before, has turned them into a new class of refugees.
And early risers, too. It is not unusual for many to be up by 6 a.m. to face long journeys to work, often leaving home before dawn to beat the worst of the traffic. But no matter how much the roads are improved, they're clogged by commuters in cars, some of them driving 50 miles or more to workplaces in the city or strung out along the M50.
Iarnród Éireann has laid on commuter trains to serve Dublin's expanding empire. The earliest of them leave Athlone at 6.18 a.m., Longford at 6.23 a.m., Carlow at 6.30 a.m., Portlaoise at 6.44 a.m. and Arklow at 6.55 a.m. There are plans to extend the Arklow service to Gorey early next year due to its emergence as a suburb of Dublin.
The number of Dublin-bound passengers using Bus Éireann's commuter services has nearly doubled, from 3,500 in 1999 to 6,500 in 2002 - and it's still growing. The company's business development manager, Tim Hayes, says it is running 25 buses from Navan to Dublin during the morning peak to carry 1,200 people on that route alone.
Buses run every 15 minutes from 7 a.m. onwards from places such as Navan, Drogheda and Clane, Co Kildare, and every 30 minutes from outer locations such as Edenderry, Co Offaly. "We go out as far as Cavan, Mullingar, Tullamore, Portlaoise, Abbeyleix, Tullow and Gorey, which is the latest commuter route within a 60-mile radius of Dublin," he says.
The problem for Bus Éireann is that all of this traffic is one-way. "We might bring 1,000 passengers in from Ashbourne in the morning, but there's only 15 going out [at that time\]," Hayes explains. And since most of the passengers are travelling to Dublin on discounted tickets, this "empty bus" syndrome makes commuter services quite uneconomic.
The other problem is the roads to Dublin are so congested, buses can no longer meet their timetables. "A bus that leaves Kells at 6 a.m. is supposed to be in Dublin at 7.30, in time to return again at 8. Now it doesn't arrive in time to make that return journey, so it has to leave Kells at 5.45 a.m. to be ahead of the rush," Hayes says.
Bus Éireann has calculated traffic congestion is costing the company €18 million a year, compounding the under-utilisation of resources implicit in its one-way flow of passengers. So it wants the National Roads Authority to allow buses to use the hard shoulder on main roads as a de facto bus lane; the NRA is not enthusiastic.
Though the company has met its targets under the National Development Plan, increasing its capacity by 50 per cent since 1999, the sprawl of Dublin is clearly a transport operational nightmare. Yet all the Minister for Transport, Séamus Brennan, talks about is introducing competition - as if that would solve the fundamental problems.
In a city, there is some chance of transport operators getting business in two directions. Yet linking land use and transport was one of the major objectives of the Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs) for the Greater Dublin Area (GDA), published in March 1999; another of its principal goals was to consolidate the Dublin metropolitan area.
Compiled by the GDA's seven local authorities in conjunction with the Department of the Environment, the guidelines were supposed to provide an agreed strategic planning framework for the development plans of the local authorities to accommodate the rapid population growth the authors anticipated in the period up to 2011.
Apart from consolidating the existing built-up area of Dublin and its immediate environs (known as the metropolitan area), the SPGs proposed to concentrate development in a limited number of growth centres within its largely rural hinterland - mainly in counties Meath, Kildare and Wicklow - separated from each other by "strategic greenbelts".
It was intended that these growth centres in the hinterland area would develop in the longer term as self-sufficient towns with a full range of facilities and only limited commuting to Dublin. The designated centres were Drogheda, Navan, Balbriggan, Naas-Newbridge-Kilcullen and Wicklow, as well as Athy, Arklow and Kildare-Monasterevin.
Development outside these centres was to be strictly limited to "local needs". The guidelines expressly recommended that land should not otherwise be zoned for housing in the hinterland area unless it was located within areas identified for development in the strategy, and served by adequate public transport, water supply and drainage.
All seven local authorities within the GDA were instructed to revise their development plans to conform with the SPGs. Though the guidelines were given statutory force under the 2000 Planning Act, they have been widely ignored by local authorities which supposedly subscribed to them in 1999 - particularly Meath, Kildare and Wicklow.
The central weakness in the Act was that they were only required to "have regard to" the Strategic Planning Guidelines. As the High Court found last September, in a judicial review case against the Meath county plan, the guidelines were "rarely if ever discussed or referred to" while councillors were dealing with land rezoning. What happened was a free-for-all.
Worse still, nothing was done by the then Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, or his successor, Martin Cullen, to halt this rezoning spree. Apart from letters to Meath, Kildare and Wicklow county councils expressing concern about what was happening, no action was taken to ensure their development plans complied with the SPGs.
No attempt has been made to restrain rogue councillors in counties Louth, Westmeath, Laois, Carlow and Wexford from rezoning large tracts of land for housing quite shamelessly targeted at Dublin commuters. Yet this, too, is happening in defiance of official Government policy, as expressed in the SPGs, to contain Dublin's growth within the Greater Dublin Area.
According to the guidelines, any spread of development generating significant levels of car commuting is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable. Sporadic and dispersed development, notably one-off housing in the countryside, was also branded as unsustainable and "should be subject to strict control", the authors said.
But they had nothing to say about "Dublin" leap-frogging over the Greater Dublin Area's boundaries. Even though this was already happening when the SPGs were being compiled, it was never envisaged that the outer Leinster counties would grab shares in the capital's unprecedented growth and, in effect, cash in on it. The issue was simply ignored.
It is still being ignored, four years later. Those in charge of implementing the guidelines - to the extent that they are being implemented at all - take the complacent view that housing in the outer commuter belt will become less attractive as the penny drops about the consequences of spending long hours behind the wheel of a car.
Incredibly, according to a recent book, Transport Investment and Economic Development, Ireland is the most car-dependent society in the world. The average car here travels 24,400 kilometres (15,250 miles) per year, a figure that is 70 per cent higher than France or Germany, 50 per cent higher than Britain and 30 per cent higher than the US.
The social effects of long-distance car commuting in the US have been well-documented by Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, particularly in terms of its negative impact on "social capital", or traditional community life involving face-to-face contacts with neighbours in local shops, pubs, parks and community groups. Putnam found such commuting is "demonstrably bad" for social capital because it substantially reduces the amount of time people have to "get involved", or even be with their children. "In round numbers, the evidence suggests that each additional 10 minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 per cent."
According to Prof Kevin Leyden, of West Virginia University, exhausted Americans learn what they know about their world and the people in it via television instead of participating in that world and talking to the people in it. And he had this dire warning for us: "Car-orientated sprawl will ruin the social fabric of your nation."
Cultural dislocation must also be a by-product of the parasitic pattern of development that is feeding off Dublin. Certainly, there was something poignant about the sight of so many Dublin flags flying from houses in Rochfortbridge, Co Westmeath - 50 miles from the city - on the weekend of last August's GAA football semi-final in Croke Park. There are real social costs, too. With so many bits of "Dublin" popping up on the outskirts of Leinster towns and villages, the Department of Education is faced with the task of providing new schools for these areas of unplanned growth. A similar headache is faced by the Department of Health in terms of providing new health centres.
The 2002 Census gives planners in both departments a rough guide to what may be required. The Department of Education also liaises with local authorities on their development plans and is currently processing applications for two new schools in Navan and one each in Clonee, Co Meath, Rush and Lusk, in north Co Dublin, and Wicklow town.
"Unfortunately, there's no scientific formula that if you build 1,500 houses, you're going to have ready-made families with X number of kids," a Department of Education official told The Irish Times. "In some areas, it's not going to impact all at once, but rather evolve over a period of 10 years, while in others new housing may redress dropping enrolments."
Additional provision will also be required to build new sewage treatment plants and upgrade existing ones, to provide piped water, electricity and telephone lines for all the new housing and more road space to cater for the extra traffic it will generate - not to mention new Garda stations, playing fields and other essential community facilities.
At the same time, we are faced with a "stranded assets" syndrome, in economist-speak. Even as new schools and health centres are built in areas of population growth, whether planned or not, older facilities in established urban areas - including parts of Dublin city - are in danger of becoming redundant because their population is in decline.
Certainly, in terms of gross figures, population increases recorded by the 2002 Census are more significant in the established suburbs of Dublin than they are in the far-flung reaches of Commuterland. The biggest single increase was in the Esker area of Lucan, where the population almost trebled in six years to reach a figure of 21,785.
This is taking place in an area where development was planned, however chaotically, and is in line with the objective of the Strategic Planning Guidelines to consolidate the metropolitan area. What is happening in Rochfortbridge and other places outside the Greater Dublin Area, as well as some areas inside it, defies planning policy.
It will also have knock-on effects on the much-vaunted National Spatial Strategy. Because if more and more growth is absorbed by Dublin and its ever-expanding commuter belt, there is less chance of the other eight "gateways" and nine "hubs" identified by the strategy developing the necessary critical mass in social, cultural or economic terms.
The SPGs that were meant to guide Dublin's development have been exposed as a paper tiger, with merely notional effect. Indeed, there is such a free-for-all on land rezoning that it raises the issue of whether it would be any worse if there was no "planning" at all and developers were simply allowed to build whatever they like, wherever they like.
The losers are those who must live with the consequences of making it up as we go along and the persistent failure to implement the 1974 Kenny Report on Building Land - now being belatedly dusted down - which would have allowed land required for development to be compulsorily acquired at marginally more than its agricultural value.
Had that been done, new homes in Dublin would have been much more affordable and we would not have ended up with a capital city sprawling out all over Leinster. And without the vulgar profits to be made from haphazard, developer-led land rezoning, we wouldn't have needed a judicial tribunal to find out what went wrong - and why.