Mr. Garret Doocey:

I will address what has happened with metro proposals in Dublin since 2011. In 2011, the Government decided not to proceed with what was then Metro North. That was the end of that project. In 2015, an analysis was conducted. The Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study was published. It concluded that there is a need for a metro solution in the north Dublin and Fingal area. That analysis fed into the greater Dublin area transport strategy, which was published in 2016, which reiterated that there was a need for a metro. It also concluded that there was a need for a metro on the south side of the city along the Luas green line. That project became MetroLink. Since 2018, expenditure on that project has been classed as MetroLink. Since then, as the exchanges with Deputy McAuliffe earlier indicated, there was the emerging preferred route consultation. There was substantial public response to that, including from public representatives and local communities. There was a further public consultation on the preferred route and changes were made between those two consultation periods in response to the issues raised by public representatives and local communities.

Since the conclusion of the preferred route public consultation, that project has been brought forward for much more detailed planning, design and environmental preparation for the planning application. I apologise if the Deputy heard this earlier. The focus in the Department is to complete our review of the preliminary business case. That case was submitted to us this year for the first time. We are awaiting a revised draft. We will then complete our review with the ambition to allow our Minister to bring it to Government as soon as possible. At a project level, various issues associated with the complex task of bringing a mammoth project such as this into the planning process are being completed. Government approval should be well in advance of the project entering the statutory planning system.