Mr. Hugh Creegan:

I will start with some of Deputy Rock's questions, some of which were quite detailed. His first question was if we would commit to announcing changes as soon as possible after the consultation ends. The answer is "Yes". It will take us a little bit of time to absorb all of the feedback because many issues are involved, not just the issues that have been mentioned here but many other issues as well. It will be as soon as practicable after the end of that work. We are conscious that people would like certainty and TII and ourselves will try to make an announcement as quickly as possible.

The Deputy asked if there were implications if the tunnel boring launch moved to a different location. The short answer is that there are implications, such as cost. Every time one makes a change, it has a cost implication. We are conscious of the fact that we have a certain allocation of money from the Government. The sum is very significant but we must still deliver the project within budget. There may be time implications or implications on residents and other things nearby. It would all be about the specifics.

The Deputy asked about the number of truck movements. We have not reached the stage of assessing individual truck movements. A couple of people have provided information from the previous metro north project. We would say that is probably in the right order but we have not reached the stage in the project where we have detailed information because, as we have said, we are at the emerging preferred route stage.

A human health assessment has not been undertaken as of yet, but the Deputy is absolutely right that it has to be done. It is usually done as part of what used to be called an environmental impact statement but is now called an environmental impact assessment report. At that stage it would have to be undertaken. The other queries about consultation will be dealt with by Mr. Nolan.

Deputy Lahart raised a number of questions. One of points he made was that we did not highlight the sports ground among the issues and challenges in the document. He is perfectly right about that. We thought we had included it under property acquisition. It arises out of the temporary acquisition of the site and we thought we had covered it but obviously we were not clear enough. The Deputy asked us what alternatives had been considered. There is a document available for download on the MetroLink site, which shows all of the alternatives that were gone through. I would say that all in all we probably looked at more than 100 alternatives for the scheme and teased through each of them one by one to try to work out the best option to bring forward at this stage.

Deputy Munster asked about the rate of boring advancement and spoke about her American colleague who gave her some information. We have given a time range, which is probably the worst case scenario, and we are right to give the worst case scenario. If we were to sugar coat it and say it was less than that people would rightly be concerned. Whatever rate is technically possible, and I do not think it is as fast as the rate quoted by Deputy Munster, is the rate the tunnel will advance at each day. I do not think tunnels of this size would get up to that particular rate of advancement.

The Deputy also asked whether this would be a public private partnership or an Exchequer-funded scheme. We are operating on the basis the Government is allocating funding from Exchequer resources, but I am conscious the national development finance agency has a part to play later in advising whether this is the right decision. We are advancing on the basis that is Exchequer funded and not a public private partnership, but this will be concluded later.

Deputy Munster also asked why it took so long to lay the tracks for the Luas cross city. I realise it is a different project but her point was whether we learned any lessons from it. The Luas cross city took as long as it did because we were being very careful going through the city centre of Dublin, where traders were expressing their views to us that they were struggling from a retail activity point of view and needed us not to shut down the streets fully in the way we might like in order to do it expeditiously. We had very close engagement with the TII and the traders for several years and did the scheme in a way that kept businesses operational and functioning. It might not have been the fastest way to do it, but had we done it the fastest way it is not what they would have appreciated or wanted.

Senator Ó Céidigh mentioned extending the public consultation process and he was quite passionate about it. This issue with this was raised elsewhere, which is the longer it is extended the longer there is uncertainty. We will take that away and consider what is the right thing to do. There are pluses and minuses as we can see.

Deputy Shortall had a number of queries. One was about a briefing for public representatives. We are conscious we tried to do that on the day of launch, when we organised a briefing session for all of the public representatives. That is what we tried to do at that stage. The Deputy also asked how many alternative sites we had examined for Glasnevin. We have not looked up the exact number but we looked at a myriad of station locations in that general area. They are all in the document. In terms of alternatives, we looked at more than 100 alternatives for the overall project. With regard to sites for specific stations we looked at tens of alternatives in each case. There are also issues which Mr. Nolan will cover.