Analysis: Ireland has shown an unwillingness for decades to produce and enact coherent economic, social and spatial plans
One of the striking features of official Ireland in the 20th century was its reluctance to plan, whether economically, socially or spatially. The economic plans (or 'programmes') of the late 1950s and 1960s were both vague and unambitious compared to those in countries like Italy, France or Japan.
For example 1963's Second Programme for Economic Expansion set the growth target for industry at 7% without any indication of how this could be achieved, only because it was the necessary figure to meet the broader economic growth target of 4% set by the OECD. Both the second and third programmes were abandoned once it appeared unlikely that their targets would be achieved, demonstrating little understanding of the real purpose of the exercise.
Similarly, the National Development Plans of the 1990s were really exercises in securing EU funding, an activity which Ireland became almost embarrassingly good at. For much of the decade, the country received about twice as much structural funding per head as comparable countries like Spain or Portugal, an imbalance which did not escape them. The Irish officials responsible acknowledged internally that the allocation of much of the funding was incoherent once it arrived, again because of the absence of a broader plan.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland in October 2023, Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Paschal Donohoe discusses the progress of the National Development Plan
This reluctance to plan was accompanied by a marked disinclination to acknowledge tensions between competing objectives and to prioritise accordingly. There was a very brief attempt to bring coherence to social spending in the early 1970s. The Department of Finance arranged a series of meetings with the major spending departments to determine their overarching objectives.
Officials from the Department of Education identified public demand as the primary driver of the nature and extent of the services it provided. While this approach was entirely valid, it unavoidably created a gap between the supply and demand for skilled labour, the implications of which were never meaningfully confronted.
During the exercise, officials from the Department of Health reported constant pressure to improve the service, driven by new technologies and expectations that services would keep pace with those delivered abroad. But there was also marked public opposition to any rationalisation of hospitals, despite negative implications for both the quality of the service and affordability. Again, there was little political appetite to publicly acknowledge that some goals were mutually incoherent, and the process was quickly abandoned.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime in January 2007, assessment and reaction to the Government's 2007 National Development Plan
Irish spatial planning has been dogged by the same incoherence. The National Development Plan in 2000 warned that population growth was disproportionately concentrated in the Dublin area. The logical response was to develop the other cities, which, as the plan suggested, offered the critical mass necessary to deliver quality infrastructure and services. But this was never likely to survive Irish political pressures and was watered down almost immediately.
The National Spatial Strategy, published two years later, included eight ‘Gateways’ and nine mid-sized ‘Hubs’. This, in turn, was promptly ignored by a planned extension of the rail network, which pointedly omitted some of the Hubs.
Even before the civil service decentralisation scheme was introduced in 2003, it was similarly subsumed by local political concerns. Over 130 towns petitioned then Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy for jobs, with TDs clamouring to secure their share of the pie. One Independent TD explicitly quantified this as ‘750 decentralised jobs for County Tipperary’. These efforts were not futile, and the scheme eventually included every single county outside of Dublin. TDs were assured that the locations were not chosen based on ‘any one set of criteria’ and that ‘no town would be excluded by any methodology’.
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From RTÉ Archives, Anne Marie Smyth reports for RTÉ News in 2000 on what decentralisation means for civil servants and the regions
Part of this reluctance to plan emanates from fatalism. The Irish economy was a chronic under-performer until the 1990s. Work on a fourth programme for economic expansion was quickly abandoned in the early 1970s once officials realised that the likely outcome was for net job losses, no matter what policies they pursued.
Similarly, spatial planning was a grim exercise when the population was actively shrinking. Even now, Ireland remains one of the least-densely populated countries in Europe, with 73 people per kilometre. The only countries with significantly lower densities have vast tracts in the far arctic circle, like Norway and Sweden.
Ireland's economic success comes with responsibility and will demand meaningful planning of the kind we have avoided for far too long
We can never observe too often that Ireland has been transformed over the past 30 years. Living standards have jumped from less than two-thirds of those of our neighbours to parity. In terms of demographics, we are again bucking the trend, but this time in the opposite direction. Unlike much of Europe, we have experienced very rapid population growth, of approximately a third since the turn of the millennium.
This reflects economic success in the same way that the emigration of the 19th and 20th centuries reflected economic failure. Success comes with responsibility, however, and will demand meaningful planning of the kind we have avoided for far too long.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
