Development lobbyists have been urged to stop blaming town planners for delays in getting projects started.
Delegates to a major conference on town planning were told yesterday that the system could not cope with the huge demands placed on it because of under-funding by governments and local authority managers for the past 35 years.
The annual conference of the Irish Planning Institute also heard several experts say plans for higher-density housing would fail unless accompanied by a more sophisticated approach to design.
The IPI president, Mr Niall Cussen, told the conference in Waterford that he had a clear message for development lobbyists - "get off our backs".
"Let's face it, we still have planning authorities who have not had the resolve to employ permanent planners since the 1963 (Planning Development) Act came into force," he said.
While many county councils now employed planners, "you are much less likely to encounter them in urban district councils or other urban entities, where the issues are more complex and the need for skill in handling them is urgent," Mr Cussen said.
He welcomed the guidelines for higher-density housing but said they "should not be seen as a panacea to lower house prices alone. The dividend that increasing house densities should pay should be an environmental one and not just for the house builders."
He said the market's initial response to the idea of increasing densities was simply to compress traditional forms of development, and this was unacceptable.
Unless urgent action was taken, "delivering the dream" was likely to be constrained by several major factors, including the building industry, which produced a standard product for a market which traditionally had offered little choice, particularly in the regions.
Public representatives, it appeared, remained unconvinced of the need for increasing densities. "Could this be because less extensive areas of land will have to be rezoned?", he asked.
Mr Tony Reddy, an architect and urban designer, said a monoculture planning syndrome had created the sprawl of edge-of-town housing estates with "boring twostorey detached or semi-detached houses stretched out along roads wide enough for two fire engines to pass at speed, bounded by excessively wide pavements and front gardens, with minimal local shopping or recreational provision".
Mr Melville Dunbar, an architect and planner, said far too much "useless open space" was allocated to suburban housing areas, when there could be real improvements in character if "new lines of houses were built to face on to a lesser area of space", with improved landscaping "and usefulness of that space which remained".
Another speaker, Athy Urban District Council member Mr Frank Taaffe, said the urban renewal scheme had not had nearly the same impact in rural Ireland as it had in Dublin. The development of apartments, where provided in town centres, had given a viable alternative to rented accommodation but had still failed to revitalise town centres in terms of community living.
