Ms Anne Graham:

I want to assure those here today and anyone listening to this broadcast that we are listening. We are a body that tries to respond to those who who make submissions to us. We are listening and we will respond where we can, wherever possible, to mitigate against the impact of what will be the preferred route. Again I say this is an emerging preferred route. We put forward what we feel was the optimum route, primarily from an engineering point of view, but it did raise flags. Of course there are flags when one is putting a major construction project like this through a residential community and through facilities that support the community in Glasnevin and Drumcondra.

What we want to do now is to take the submissions, take what has been said here today, and give that consideration. We will then come forward and have further meetings with the affected parties to see if we can put forward a preferred route that everyone can support. We are not naive in that because we understand we are never going to be able solve everybody's problems, and there may not be a solution where everyone is going to be able to support us. What we will try to do is to mitigate and provide a solution that most of the community can support.

We were very careful in terms of our consultation. The launch was a media launch to ensure that the media were informed about what the project was. Any individual stakeholder that was going to be impacted directly by the proposed emerging preferred route received correspondence in advance of that.

We organised a consultation period specifically for public representatives on 22 April from 4 p.m. to 8.p.m. and a number of representatives did attend. We will be happy to do more, and we certainly can do further briefings, if requested; we will be open to doing that at any stage. We are always open to setting up further briefings, and of course if we are requested to attend any committee we will do so; we have never refused to attend this committee or any other.