Sir – As I read with interest through the initial paragraphs of Justine McCarthy’s article (“Dublin is bursting at the seams, but the solution is obvious,” June 19th), I wondered where she was going next. While, as a Sligo native myself, I was delighted with her suggestion that Sligo should become the sixth city in the country, I’m not sure that such an innovation is ultimately going to be what deals in a positive way with the overall functional balance deficit which afflicts our nation.
Firstly, many people in Sligo would say that the place they call home is already a city – it certainly fulfils many of the functions which one would expect to be among the criteria required to determine its status as such.
Be that as it may, I take the view that Justine’s point that “Dublin is bursting at the seams” is absolutely correct but would challenge the suggestion that the solution to the problem lies in the concept of enhancement of the future prosperity and enhancement of a single regional capital town/city such as Sligo.
All regions outside of the capital must be part of the solution and must benefit from whatever evolves to deal with the Dublin problem.
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There is little point in having a regional development strategy, as the Government claims to have, unless it is seriously acted upon and implemented in a meaningful way.
When one realises that more that 25 per cent of the working population of Dublin live well outside the city and have to commute to work daily, 60 per cent by car, from a commuter belt that incorporates most of the counties of Leinster, there are significant challenges to be met.
The reasons that such is the case is clear – not enough housing in Dublin, the consequential exorbitant cost of purchase or rental of the minimal offering that is available, the traffic congestion arising from the presence of vehicular traffic which doesn’t want to be there, the adverse environment impact arising from the presence of this traffic, and so on. To add insult to injury, we know that Dublin, with a quarter of the country’s population, accounts for almost three quarters of Ireland’s homeless people.
Yet, there is no serious suggestion anywhere that the country’s so-called regional development strategy is being proactively pursued at Government level, very little in terms of incentives to make the regions outside of Dublin more attractive from an investment point of view and very little being done to promote better use of good quality infrastructure that is available to give relief to the ever evolving mess that our capital city is being allowed to become.
Why is it that more than 50 per cent of jobs facilitated by IDA clients emerged in Dublin over the past five years when the people taking up those positions have no homes to avail of there, why is it that there’s a sense that every additional air route in and out of the country must be crammed through an already overwhelmed Dublin Airport and why is it that the many benefits that focused regional development, right across the country, would bring are not being availed of?
Fixing Dublin is not about adding more to the mire but rather about giving it space to breathe while the regions transform the capital’s burden into the country’s benefit. – Yours, etc,
TOM TIERNAN,
Ennis,
Co Clare.
