Balanced regional development - Airport plan is unthinking and flawed

Even if you were to confine the exercise to a timeframe book-ended by Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation proposals from 2003, the number of reports warning about unbalanced regional development would, if laid back-to-back, stretch almost the length of the main runway at Dublin Airport.

Despite everything, despite one policy statement after another promising to rebalance unbalanced regional development — polite code for greater Dublin’s relentless, all-consuming momentum — continues apace. This is not a particularly Irish phenomenon but in such a small, inter-connected, inter-reliant country it seems almost a deepening Rubicon dividing the Ireland of yesterday and the Ireland of tomorrow.