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

I am very glad that Deputy Catherine Murphy raised the issue of our common past on the Dublin transportation advisory committee. We were the poster children for the touchy-feely bottom-up civil engagement NGO contributory approach being advocated by the witnesses. It was brilliant because it educated us and we, in turn, educated the system. It led to better debate and analysis and it really worked. I agree 100% with the touchy-feely bottom-up engagement approach being advocated.

I was slightly disheartened by an approach previously taken. In the late 1990s, we wrote and were involved in a very good platform for change plan. It was very well done with good modelling, people and our best engineers. I will always remember a presentation given to us as the advisory committee in the closing stages of that process. I do not know whether Deputy Murphy remembers it. Those presenting told us that, whatever we did, we should build the metro and the DART interconnector first, rather than widening the M50 or investing in roads. They stated that was what we must do. The committee decided that it would do so. I kept telling my wife that Dublin was about to change and it was going to be a cycling city. We went to Utrecht for weeks and came back with the required information. Utrecht had been pursuing that approach for 25 years and knew what to do. What did we do in Ireland? We widened the M50 and put off the metro. We have done nothing on cycling or buses for the past 15 or 20 years.

I did not give up. I kept going, got into government and wrote a sustainable transport plan. I thought we should make the Dublin Transportation Office model bigger and do it all over the country and set up the National Transport Authority, NTA. What happened? My party went out of government and the sustainable transport plan was thrown away. Nothing has happened in respect of the models for what we needed to do over the past eight years. The NTA was taken over by the National Roads Authority. We have had a roads-based transport system for the past ten years under that structure.

I still did not give up hope. The recent national planning framework says the same thing we have been saying for 30 years: that we must go back into the centre and the core. I thought there may still be hope. I still said to my wife when I got home at night that the situation was about to change and that we were going to move to sustainable transport. What happened? The national development plan abandoned sustainable transport. It is all about roads, as is ever the case. It states that 50% of new housing will be built outside existing urban areas. How does one square that with the national planning framework? This is being run by IBEC. We have a big industrial base that knows how to make money out of roads. Even if the roads do not make transport sense, they make economic sense because people are good at making money out of making roads. I am sorry if that is a cynical attitude, but I am releasing 30 years of frustration.

Politics, which trumps everything, is part of the problem. One may have all the bottom-up touchy-feely approach but it is top-down politics that counts. According to the NTA household travel survey, some 75% of journeys - 80% nationwide - are by car, while public transport accounts for 5% of trips. Politicians are not stupid. Advertising agencies spend millions promising people that if we get another little bit of road, we will finally be free. Politicians represent the 80% who travel by car and are very sensitive to their wishes, so we steer based on that false promise.

Another reason that we have not moved to a sustainable transport system is that doing so is difficult. The bottom-up touchy-feely approach is needed because this involves reallocating space and it is difficult to do so when 75% of journeys are by car and one wants to reduce that rate. This is about parking, trucks and winning back space for children, cyclists, elderly persons, blind persons or anyone else who is not involved in the big industrial roads-based system which aims to keep making money out of cars and, as such does not count.

Dr. Devaney is correct in her point on framing. I saw Deputy Michael Healy-Rae with his flat cap on television last night. I have great time for him, but he was saying that he is not sure about the proposals for sustainability and asking what about the poor people and farmers. It is the same old framing. What about the 200,000 people who commute for more than two hours a day, which is injurious to their health? Some 80,000 of them have young children. What about the children who do not see their parents? What about the 80% of Irish children who do not get the recommended level of daily exercise because of the system we have created? Will that ever be taken into account on a prime time show or in the framing of this debate? It will not.

My hopes were raised by the climate action plan because it seemed that there was some urgency about it. Officials in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport appeared before the committee, but their performance was excruciatingly poor. They did not know what was their ambition for 2030. Representatives of Transport Infrastructure Ireland appeared before the committee and were asked - I will never forget it - for their solution to gridlock in Dublin. The solution they published is to widen the N7 between Naas and Newbridge as well as the N6, the N3, the N2 and the N11. That was their answer to the question of how to improve transport in Dublin.

There is some brilliant stuff in the climate action plan around governance and the action plans approach to beginning to work on this area. Everything it contains in that respect is right. However, the section delaying with transport is an utter disgrace. Deputy Murphy is right that we need other people to start saying that. I challenge anyone to point out where I am wrong. The reliance on a McKinsey marginal abatement cost curve, MACC, is so early 2000s in terms of climate change policy that it is embarrassing. The promise of a cycling office is so 1990s. We have heard that promise so often that I am tired of it. The promise of a scrappage scheme that has not even been worked out sounds like it comes from Society of the Irish Motor Industry. It is ill thought-out and inappropriate. The doubling of the number of electric vehicles on the back of a McKinsey MACC curve is not good enough, given that we spent two years at this. The Department should be ashamed if that is the best it can come up with.