Volume 67 (2019): Issue 3 (August 2019)

The evolution of spatial planning in Ireland, and more widely, has been a complex process in which many narratives have been explored at different times. In 2018 the government published the National Planning Framework (NPF) to guide and support the achievement of a challenging and potentially transformative development strategy for Ireland 2040. The NPF is grounded in a vision that sets out to be disruptive of what has become embedded as the status quo in political, administrative and planning decision-making. While it is a very innovative addition to the portfolio of government policies and strategies, it is not the first time that radical visions have been proposed. This paper reviews previous visions and plans for regional development that have been proposed over the last seventy-five years, and critically compares and contrasts the approaches represented by the National Spatial Strategy (2002–20) and the NPF (2018–40), including the subsequent draft regional spatial and economic strategies. The implications of the population projections and the proposed settlement patterns for the achievement of the NPF objective of effective regional development, which is expressed as a regional parity target, are closely examined.

The so-called Buchanan report, commissioned by the Irish government and published in May 1969, comprised a set of proposals for regional industrial development in Ireland over the period 1966–86. The main thrust of the report was the concentration of the great bulk of new industrial employment creation in Dublin and eight proposed ‘growth centres’. The plan provided for the creation of powerful planning authorities to oversee development in the regions. The government rejected these proposals and opted instead to continue with the existing policy of widespread dispersal of new industry. While meeting with initial success, this policy proved unsustainable in the long term. The paper reviews the implications of the Buchanan report experience for the regional planning process in Ireland, arguing that failure to learn from this experience served to undermine the National Spatial Strategy, with a similar fate likely for the forthcoming National Planning Framework.

In the fifty years since the publication of the Buchanan report, Regional Studies in Ireland, Ireland has transitioned from a rural to an urban society. Although a number of spatial plans have been introduced at regional and local levels, the growth of over 1.5 million people in the urban population has occurred in the absence of any strong national-level direction of spatial or settlement policy. This paper examines the nature of urbanisation in the half-century since 1966, by looking at the development of the urban hierarchy of cities and towns. Significant long-term changes in both the structure and the spatial expression of the urban hierarchy are identified, on the basis of which urbanisation is characterised as having been deconcentrated and decentralised. The paper identifies some implications of the observed shifts for contemporary policy concerns, and in particular the 2018 National Planning Framework.