Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There is absolute agreement that there can be no delay in the broader project. Clearly, we must do things within legislative and other mechanisms but we have a real transport crisis in our city. We face a congestion charge of €2 billion a year because Dublin is such a car dominated city. I recall from our separate work at the Joint Committee on Climate Action that Ms Graham replied to a question that I asked about the estimate. Even with the metro and BusConnects, we are looking at a 30% increase in transport emissions in Dublin by 2030 when we need a 30% reduction at least. So, we have an absolute crisis. I know from the work done by the Joint Committee on Climate Action and other committees that a whole range of measures will have to be taken in other sectors of society, and that we will have to be quick and resolute in our approach. We will not resolve the matter here today, and I hear what the witnesses have said on that aspect. I think the political system is going to come back to the NTA to ask it to come up with ways to speed up the process.

Even if, for some reason, it is ruled out or not agreed, a general approach of delaying transport infrastructure is the last one that we should be adopting. As we have that tunnelling machine coming south of the Liffey, it would be a tragedy to fail to use it in a productive way. Other parts of the city are going to have a similar dramatic increase in the scale of public transport investment we are going to make. That strategy will probably be challenged and changed in other ways. For example, we will have to ramp things up because the climate agreement we will have to conclude with the European Union will say our plans are not sufficient. The national development plan included no climate assessment and there is a legal challenge against that, rightly. We are facing the European Union which is not going to give us an out on our climate emissions targets. We will have to so much more on transport that any plan cannot be regarded as fixed. In particular, where we have a project where this is a variation, any court or planning system will see that, during the consultation process, people came forward with alternative suggestions. If we do not have a public consultation that allows for such variation, that process would say it was not a proper public consultation. While I think it is a proper public consultation, we should not get caught in the weeds of timelines for statutory plans that see us missing an opportunity. That is the one point I would make. If that requires political action by way of legislative or other measures, it will be possible for us to do it. However, we must work fast now to do the modelling quickly and to assess as best we can the alternatives. The political system will be coming looking for that because we have this challenge.