The Irish Times

If Eoin O Cofaigh, president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) is right in estimating that the average design spend for many speculatively-built suburban estates works out at £400 per house - about the cost of a decent washing machine - is it any wonder that the resulting residential environments are so woeful?. And what chance is there that things will get much better when local authority planners - the gatekeepers of the building boom, as Philip Jones, president of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), put it - are barely able to cope with an avalanche of schemes offering more of the same?

The RIAI and the IPI, at a joint conference in Dublin last Thursday entitled Stopping the Sprawl, were trying to drive home their message that new housing needs to be "design-led" and built at higher densities if we are to achieve the elusive goal of achieving "sustainable development".