​Investment in infrastructure to 2030 will be concentrated on the building of new motorways, a fact that reflects and reinforces Ireland’s car-dependent culture. This concentration on personal freedom supports the other national obsession-owning a house on a piece of land’. Together these aspirations have generated unsustainable housing patterns - one-offs, ribbon development and suburban clusters - that are now characteristic of the Irish landscape. A reevaluation of the land, moving away from cash-crop housing towards an evolving productive landscape, makes possible the sustainable interdependence of a repopulated rural hinterland and the road network that connects Ireland’s urban centres.