Mr. Michael Nolan:

It is a fair point and will be asked of us over the next while. We have very stringent rules to comply with now. Part of the economic analysis involves filtering out other transport modes, all the route options, whether to go with the N20 or the N24 or Mitchelstown. One of our activities is to create a traffic model for the whole area. It may be the case when we have gone through that process that we will arrive back at the route as presented to An Bord Pleanála previously. It may be 90% or 80% on that old line and we will see how much of that old work we can recover, site investigation, land ownership, surveying and the environmental baseline data. It is too early to determine how much of that previous work we can recover. We would like to recover as much as we can but we have to give it a fair shot because when we go back to An Bord Pleanála, we will be tested through all our processes and do not want to be accused of dusting down the old drawings and doing it the lazy way. The environment has changed, people’s travel patterns may have changed, traffic levels have increased and land ownership has changed. There may be special areas of conservation, SACs, that have been extended over the area. These are considerations we must take on board.

One of the big risks in going to An Bord Pleanála is project splitting. It is more efficient to go with a full project and get approval for 80 km, justify it and detail the environmental considerations and mitigation measures, ask for consent and hear the public's views.