Atlantic Gateways
The Atlantic Gateways report was officially launched on 14th September 2006 by Minister Dick Roche, TD, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government.
The National Spatial Strategy aims to promote balanced regional development: better spread of job opportunities, better quality of life for all and better places to live in. In order to achieve more balanced regional development, a greater share of economic activity must take place outside the Greater Dublin Area. One measure to achieve this has been through new and existing gateways, developing national and regional scale activities to provide additional choice to Dublin. The gateways represent a small number of nationally significant centres, whose location and scale support the achievement of the type of critical mass necessary to sustain strong levels of job growth in the regions.
The Atlantic Gateways initiative envisages the active collaboration of the city-regions of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford, together with the corridors which link them, in forming an economic unit which looks to itself in the first instance, and which has the scale and critical mass to act as an economic counterbalance to the Greater Dublin Area, and even so to the emergent Dublin-Belfast axis.
The project involved a partnership between the Department of the Environment, Heritage & Local Government, the relevant Regional Authorities (and their constituent local authorities) and Shannon Development. The Project ran for 12 months and was closely linked with the Regional Planning Guidelines process. The project was managed by Shannon Development and Technical Support provided by FGS Consulting.
