LABOUR PARTY president Michael D Higgins has defended the case for balanced regional development against recent criticism of the National Spatial Strategy.
The "Atlantic Way" project creates an opportunity for "new economics and a genuine regionalism", Mr Higgins said.
He was commenting at the weekend on the recently published study by Dublin Institute of Technology's (DIT) Futures Forum, entitled Twice the Size? Imagineering the Future of Irish Gateways.
The study and a recent series of articles published by several of the participating DIT academics in The Irish Times have questioned the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) approach. They make the case for discarding the NSS approach in favour of support for a "European city-region in the east". The west coast should build on cultural distinctiveness to become a "Switzerland of the Atlantic ".
By 2030, some two-thirds of Ireland's population of about 6.45 million will be living on about a quarter of the land and within 35km of the entire east coast, the DIT academics Conor Skehan and Dr Lorcan Sirr have estimated.
"No plan for 'balanced regional development' is going to prevent that", they have stated in this newspaper, and have called for strategic planning to manage it.
Mr Higgins said that he welcomed a debate on the future of an economy which engaged with the spatial and related forms of social activity, but said that he had to challenge "weak, even dangerous assumptions" in the DIT study. These included the contention that an eastern corridor from Belfast to Waterford was likely to represent "Ireland's best opportunity to maintain a competitive position among the city-regions of an increasingly competitive Europe".
"The case for balanced regional development, since the great days of regionalism in the 1970s, was derived from different perspectives," Mr Higgins said, and an understanding of Irish migration was essential in terms of settlement patterns and trends. Many of the "new Irish " may well become "circular migrants" , living in "two worlds", for the same economic reasons, he noted.
The least developed case for regional development was the cultural case. The Atlantic Way concept, involving Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford as a counterweight to Dublin would require a "radical rethinking in relation to not just appropriate models of the economy, but its connections with the society in differing conditions".
"Different necessities of transport have come into being as a result of the dislocation between work and home, which when combined with the unaffordability of housing, have had huge impacts on the quality of life in terms of social time, stress, and health in general," Mr Higgins said, but many new forms and reconfigurations were emerging.
Mr Higgins, minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht between 1993 and 1997, noted that there had been no significant expansion in cultural infrastructure during the recent period of economic growth. It did not produce an opera house "or even a new home for the National Theatre".
