Ms Jennifer Gilmore:

I thank the committee for allowing us to be here and for their well-informed questions. I will deal with the community impact as this is something I see personally as someone who lives in the area. On the southside, the proposal is for an overground line and for an underground metro on the northside. It will be a high-speed driverless train which will be travelling approximately every 90 seconds, straight through what is a lovely village community. It will be irreversibly detrimental to our community.

I have lived in Milltown and Rathmines for most of my life and I watched the Luas line being built. I travelled here on the Luas today and I see how it has enhanced our community. It revitalised it because it is accessible and really well integrated into the community. I have spent the past few months at home with my new baby and his buggy and I have used the opportunity to look around my local neighbourhood to observe how it works. It is a largely pedestrian community and people get to the shops or to school by foot or by bicycle.

I will deal with some of the issues raised by Deputy O'Connell. The project affects the Luas from Charlemont down to Sandyford but I will concentrate on my community. There are five pedestrian crossings in our small section of Luas line, two of which take cars, at Alex and Dunville. Two of the crossings are not even mentioned in the metro submission, the one at Albany and the one at the back gate of Mount St. Annes. The community is a community of older people and young families and the area is well suited to those groups because it is relatively flat and has a lovely accessible transport system with flat crossings, as well as a nice array of local shops and businesses. At the Cowper stop, there is an old people's home which has a preschool in it so it suits both older people and young children. The children leave their schools every day on their buggies and their scooters and cross the Luas line, unimpeded. This has created a lovely village feel to the whole area and if one was planning an urban development this is what we would want to create but we are about to destroy it.

My next door neighbour is in his 80s. He had a very bad stroke last year and now walks with a walking frame but he can cross the Luas line. There are three preschools, five junior schools and three secondary schools in the area, all of them within spitting distance of our three Luas stops. There are almost 6,000 pupils going to those schools, many of them travelling on foot or by bicycle. There are 650 units in Mount St. Annes and they all use the back gate to get to town, on foot or by bicycle, or to go to Ranelagh, Rathmines, Rathgar and Terenure, and the same is true of the back gate at Alex. If we replaced our flat pedestrian crossings with footbridges or lifts, this would deter people from walking or cycling. If a journey is made a bit longer, there is evidence that it stops people from walking or cycling, meaning that they use their cars instead. What is proposed will turn a pedestrian area into one in which more cars are used.

Anyone who uses the lifts on the Luas knows that, generally, they are not fit for purpose. They are frequently broken and I have been stranded in Dundrum with my buggy and a woman in a wheelchair. I got lucky because somebody helped me down the steps but nobody could help the lady in the wheelchair down the steps. I do not go to Dundrum on the Luas any more.

It is well known that underpasses and lifts do not create safe spaces. Last week, one of my neighbours in Ranelagh met two people shooting up in the lift there. We were all really concerned about a young child who was with its parent at the Charlemont Luas stop a couple of years ago and who was stuck by a needle when grabbing the handrail in the lift at that stop and who then had to go through the psychological trauma of HIV and hepatitis testing. Footbridges and lifts are not a good addition to small village communities.

We feel that this will sever our community and will adversely affect our schools, churches, shops and businesses. It will force people into cars and will create a giant wall with a lot of noise that will lead to urban blight, where currently there is a lovely village atmosphere across a number of different areas, along with an integrated and accessible transport system. We are very upset about it and we cannot understand how the NTA could choose this option when we already have functioning transport and when there are vast swathes of the southern part of city that do not. Buses are not going to solve the problem either.