Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

To come back to a couple of points, would Mr. Creegan address the issue of the peak hours? What if the witnesses are wrong? Where is the capacity and what is the speed of capacity to amend? I am a great believer in people being pretty decent at deciding what is good for them and I tend to listen to people, because they are full of sense. When one hears a whole bunch of people telling one the same thing, I tend not to ignore it. I tend not to wait and to tell people that we will see how it goes and that if it does not work out, we will do something about it. I understand this is about planning, and this a very general point and not specifically related to this, but we have a national characteristic of creating problems and then resolving them in reverse. One can see it right across the spectrum, and we have an opportunity here to anticipate and plan and make sure the problem will not exist.

Given what I am hearing and the strength of it, I am not going to ignore it. What was really disappointing was that when we looked for a public meeting in north Kildare, we were told there was no capacity. There are 50,000 people there, many of whom we do not want in cars. It does not show respect for the fact that there are people on the edge of very major changes who will travel to a public meeting if they can get to one. The edge communities like Wicklow, where I know there have been a number of meetings, are going to have a very different service from the one that they are used to. They need to be listened to and to be provided with every opportunity to be listened to, because it is going to be awful if it is badly run in one location and one has to do a quick retrofit.