The plan should say where and how waste is to be disposed of, and how and where our national water supplies are to be protected. The space we live in is too precious to be left to vagaries of random planning applications to a multiplicity of local authorities. Unless we have a national residential plan, we will have houses that are not liveable homes, because they lack the surrounding facilities that turn a house into a home. 3.5 A village environment is normally associated with a rural setting, but a village community can develop and be encouraged within cities too. The need to allow people to associate naturally with their neighbours should be a key element of the physical redesign of urban area and of existing villages.
Villages are one of the basic building blocks of our community.
We believe that the number of towns with a population between 1,500 and 5,000 should be doubled between now and 2010 as part of this process of natural community development. 3.6 Such a plan could be financed by Irish housing bonds, floated at a fixed rate over a 30 year term, which would be attractive to global institutions and would reduce the risk to Irish public finance of short term market fluctuations. As pointed out earlier, the plan should say where and how the state will assist the growth of regional centres, by deliberately assisting the development of recreational, sporting and lifestyle enhancing facilities in those centres to which we wish to attract people to live. At the moment our planning system works on the basis of planning authorities refusing some applications and granting others. It is a negative process.