Professor Edgar Morgenroth:

On rural dwellers and CO2 emissions, the various journeys taken were factored in. What we find is that city centre dwellers have the lowest emissions followed by the real rural dwellers. It is long-distance commuters who have significantly different emissions. This stands to reason because even though the distances might be a little bit longer for people living in rural Ireland, which I do, typically the fuel consumption of the vehicle is quite low, whereas people driving in the city centre drive short distances but with high fuel consumption. This was captured in the analysis, therefore, it is not correct to say rural dwellers would end up with a higher incidence of fuel or carbon taxes. It is simply not true.

The committee should invite Professor Richard Tol before it if it wants to ask him questions. I do not share his views but I can stand over the analysis we published together.

With regard to road building, a number of significant mistakes were made in the roll-out of the motorways. There was an assumption the current transport patterns we see are optimal and we replicated the existing network and added more capacity. We never stepped back and asked whether this is the pattern we want to see. The second mistake we made with the roads programme was that we never considered the sustainability consequences relating to what was put in place. We have what we have and, of course, it is nice to drive on a nice motorway but it is also less sustainable than sitting on a train. To answer whether we should stop building roads, we should scale down the roads programme in favour of public transport.