The most important point to emerge from the National Housing Conference in Cork this week is that Irish society must develop "a clear vision of high quality, integrated, sustainable neighbourhoods that are worth building", in the words of Dr Rory O'Donnell, director of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC).
With the Central Statistics Office projecting that the State's population could be as high as five million in 2021, it is clear that we face an enormous challenge on the housing front. Where are all of the additional people going to live? Will it be close to their places of work, to schools for their children, to leisure facilities, shops and amenities? Or will more and more people spend a significant part of their lives sitting behind the wheel of a car commuting long distances on increasingly traffic-choked roads?
It is all very well for Minister for the Environment Dick Roche to indulge in a degree of self-congratulation for the prodigious output of nearly 77,000 new homes in 2004 and to point, as he did, to the fact that this is proportionately higher than any of our EU partners; indeed, at 19 new homes per 1,000 people, it is more than five times the rate in Britain. However, the pattern of residential development in Ireland is deeply unsustainable in environmental terms, given that one-off houses in the countryside account for some 40 per cent of the total output. And the so-called "Sustainable Rural Housing Guidelines" issued by Mr Roche in April, with the avowed aim of making it even easier for people to get planning permission for one-offs in rural areas, will merely compound this landscape-consuming phenomenon.
Britain may not be the best model of urban planning in Europe, but at least Tony Blair's government has a clear focus on developing "sustainable neighbourhoods" to accommodate the thousands of new homes that will be required there over the next 10 years or so. Impressively, more than two-thirds are to be provided on "brownfield sites" - former industrial areas rendered redundant by changes in the economy. The Sustainable Communities Group operating from the office of deputy prime minister John Prescott aims to promote communities that are "active, inclusive and safe, well-run, environmentally sensitive, well-designed and built, well-connected and thriving", as Richard McCarthy, its director general said in Cork.
The NESC report, "Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy", published last December, strongly suggested that we should be doing something similar. It likened the magnitude of this task to other great challenges that Ireland faced and met over the past half-century - the Lemass-Whitaker "opening up" of the Irish economy in the 1960s and the creation of a dynamic "new economy", through social partnership, from the mid-1980s onwards. The Government now needs to show that it is prepared to confront the challenge posed by the NESC in a serious way instead of merely parroting statistics about the year-on-year record output of housing.