Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Barry. I concur with the remarks of Deputy Dooley about the NRA's availability to attend. Some of the other semi-State organisations involved in transport would do well to look at how the NRA relates to the committee.

There is an ongoing issue in regard to subcontractors. While the NRA might not have a direct input into this, the Dáil yesterday passed the Construction Contracts Bill. Yet, in the last week, I have taken telephone calls from people involved in the construction of a major national road project in the south who have not been paid and do not look likely to be paid by what appears on the can to be a very reputable company, which gets a lot of work from local authorities that is funded through the NRA and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. To be honest, I believe it is reprehensible that we still have a situation whereby moneys, which Mr. Berry has acknowledged are very scarce, are channelled from the NRA through local authorities or directly to contractors but are not ending up with the people who do the work. I do not know how comfortably that sits with Mr. Barry or the NRA. I spoke to a contractor last week who knows colleagues who have not been paid for over 12 months on projects that are finished. The local authorities and the NRA do not want to know about him - nobody wants to know about him - but the main contractor has been paid. It seems the main contractor is open for business and free to be contracted again by the NRA and the local authorities.

There is a moral issue to this scandalous situation. I have a good mind to name the contractor in question, perhaps not in this forum but in the Dáil Chamber. At the end of the day, local authorities and the NRA have a moral obligation to try to protect innocent subcontractors who have to try to put food on the table for their families. These major contractors, which are hoovering up work that the NRA is funding all over the country, are walking around scot free and nobody seems to be taking any initiative to deal with this. I find that stomach-churning. I would like to get Mr. Barry's comments on that issue.

The second issue is one I have raised previously with Mr. Barry. I am perplexed as to how certain roads are identified for investment and others are not. To take Limerick, where I am from, it has three major national primary routes which have not had one cent spent on them for the past 20 years - the N21, the N24 and the N69. The N21 is probably the busiest tourism corridor in the west because it channels practically all of the tourist traffic into and out of Kerry, but nothing is spent on it. Without taking from it, I would like to know on what basis the New Ross to Enniscorthy road was chosen. Does it convey more traffic than, for example, the Limerick to Cork road, the Limerick to Waterford road or the Limerick to Tralee road? Are there criteria by which the NRA selects these corridors for investment? I would suggest that one area in dire need of investment, and which would show some semblance of joined-up thinking in regard to transport investment, is the road that links the deepest port in the country to the national road network. However, not one cent has been spent on the N69, certainly in my lifetime, with the exception of taking out a few bins and the like. Mr. Barry might explain how the PPPs and the capital investment programme that are currently included in the envelope were selected at the expense of other projects. Cork and Limerick are the two largest urban centres in the west and south and they are linked by a glorified cattle track. From an economic development point of view, surely that area was more deserving than places elsewhere that do not link the same level of population.

My final point concerns a perennial issue I have raised with Mr. Barry previously and to which he alluded a short time ago. Who is responsible for the maintenance of sterilisation orders on land that is not currently attracting any investment and is unlikely to attract it? I am thinking specifically of the N20-N21 Adare bypass, which has been the subject of jiggery-pokery on more than one occasion in terms of routes being moved at a time when there was money in the country. Now, there is no money and there is a kind of semi-sterilised corridor. The landowners are greatly affected and cannot build a henhouse on the land, yet they are told they must go on the never-never to wait for something that might never come. Who is responsible for the maintenance of that sterilisation order and under what statute are they maintaining it?