Fast-tracking is the name of the game. Instead of having to put up with endless delays caused by the vagaries of the planning process, developers are to be offered a new regime based on the third Bacon report's three benchmark criteria of "credibility, clarity and certainty".
Part 9 of the 1999 Planning Bill, which is still before the Oireachtas, already provides for the designation of Strategic Development Zones, so no new legislation is required. Until now, however, it had been understood that SDZs would be primarily for industry.
Under the legislation, which is expected to be passed before the end of this month, the Government is given the power to make orders designating particular sites as SDZs to facilitate developments that it considers of strategic importance to the economy.
The current housing crisis, with its knock-on effects in fuelling house price inflation, is now regarded as so serious that housing itself falls into this category - particularly if homes are to be found for the 200,000 extra workers needed to service the "Celtic Tiger".
SDZ areas would generally be greenfield sites, zoned and capable of being serviced, in proximity with existing or proposed public transport corridors. They would also have the potential to be planned to a high-quality design, with ancillary shopping and leisure facilities.
The designation of SDZs to meet housing demand will curtail the rights of third-party objectors, such as residents' associations and environmental groups, because they will be able to object only to an overall planning scheme, not to subsequent planning applications.
What will happen in the designated areas is that the relevant local authority would have to prepare a planning scheme for each SDZ, accompanied by an environmental impact statement, and it would then be a matter for the elected councillors to adopt, amend or reject it.
Only at this point would third parties be able to intervene by appealing to An Bord Pleanala. But if a planning scheme is approved by the board, all subsequent planning applications deemed to conform with it would be fire-proofed against further objections or appeals.
But the developers wouldn't have it all their own way. To discourage hoarding, those who fail to make a planning application within three months of the adoption of a planning scheme or to act on a permission within six months would pay an annual tax of £3,000 per house site.
The new fast-track procedure is designed to overcome what Mr Fergal MacCabe, planning consultant on the Bacon report team, described as the "classic case" of Stepaside, Co Dublin, where an action plan for some 3,500 homes, prepared in March 1999, has not yet been adopted.
Because the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county development plan specifies that the rezoning of some 200 acres of land at Stepaside is subject to a local area action plan, developers are unable even to make planning applications until the current impasse is resolved.
Now, it has been suggested that Stepaside should become an SDZ. Similar designation may be extended to other tracts of rezoned land in Balbriggan, Lusk, Baldoyle and Castaheany, all in the Fingal administrative area, as well as south Lucan and Ballycullen-Stocking Lane, in south Dublin. These are the areas suggested by Bacon, although the Government has not yet said what areas it will choose.
Other suggested zones are the "north fringe" of Dublin, including Balgriffin, Belcamp and Grange, though Pelletstown, off the Navan Road, where Dublin Corporation has prepared an ambitious action plan to house at least 8,000 people, is curiously omitted.
Altogether, a total of 36,200 new homes could be provided in these areas, at a density of 30 to 35 units per hectare (12.5 to 14.6 per acre). SDZs are also likely to cover Merlin Park-Doughiska on the east side of Galway (2,940 units) and a smaller site at Mahon, Cork (450).
In many cases, action plans have already been prepared or at least started, though the latest Bacon report accepts that drafting such planning schemes will strain the already over-stretched resources of the local authorities, where 107 of 350 planning posts are now vacant.
With planners "leaving like lemmings", as Mr MacCabe put it, for more lucrative jobs in the private sector, the report does not stop at recommending an increase in output from the UCD planning school; it also proposes importing planners from abroad. Ironically, one of the principal deterrents to this would be the high cost of housing, so "relocation expenses" might have to include a subsidy.
In order to release planners from the task of processing applications for house extensions, the exemption limits for such development are being raised from 23 sq metres (248 sq ft) to 40 sq metres (430 sq ft).
The Department of the Environment says it will also be checking in September whether all the local authorities are complying with the residential density guidelines, to make maximum use of development land. If not, they will be required to amend their plans accordingly.
However, "Bacon 3" does not even mention more radical ideas, such as the Labour Party's proposal to set up a Development Land Commission to purchase all the land required for housing, draw up plans, install the necessary services and only then release it to the private sector.
At a symposium on Dublin last Monday, Ms Eithne Fitzgerald, Labour's spokeswoman on the capital, said such a commission was needed urgently to curtail the "private fortunes" being made by landowners.
With land in certain areas of the county selling for up to £1 million per acre, these costs are adding enormously to the price of houses. At the relatively conservative densities recommended by Bacon, the site cost per unit would work out at between £60,000 and £80,000.
Neither does the report deal with the capacity of the building industry to meet the monumental task of producing at least 50,000 new homes per year. But at least it dumps on holiday homes, on which so much effort has been wasted in recent years.