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

The Deputy is a very good railway engineer with specialist knowledge in signalling and systems and so I listened with real intent. I would love to know his views on what we do with the Wexford line. It is a stunning rail line. It passes through Avoca and Rathdrum and is probably one of the most spectacular rail journeys in the world. Do we use it effectively? I come back to asking this fundamental question in the national rail review particularly because it is subject to coastal erosion. We will need to invest a lot of money to just maintain the existing line. As we are doing that, I agree with the Deputy about a bus corridor on the N11 and the electrification of the rail line as far south as Wicklow. I would be interested to hear in the Deputy's views. I said earlier that some of these new battery electric trains can sometimes extend the electrification. The advantage with that is they involve a quicker pick-up. They are in and out of the station in less time. They are much cheaper and cleaner to run. There are many benefits. I would be interested to hear the Deputy's views.

There is real co-ordination coming between the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of Transport. As I said earlier, we need to accelerate to meet our climate objectives. We need to show the same urgency we showed in dealing with Brexit and Covid to deliver because otherwise we will not meet our climate targets. Looking at various Departments in detail, transport is the biggest challenge by far. We need the same urgency and the same can-do approach to turn things around. That will require teams in the public service that pull all our agencies together. We have done that with the Covid pandemic, with Ministers meeting officials every week to ask if it is happening. We need that level of engagement to drive change at the scale and speed we need.

The Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage has a critical role in this. As I mentioned at the start of my presentation, I would love to see better analysis of actual outcomes with the national planning framework. My sense is that we are not actually delivering that. The truth is that there is still concentrated development on the east coast and a dispersed development model which is very hard to service with public transport. Some good things are happening and it is not all bad.

Part of the problem is that we do not have good data. The data system the Dublin local authorities have is different from Cork's which is different from the rest of the country when it comes to assessing what is happening on the ground with planning and housing. We can get aggregate information for a county, but that does not give the granularity of detail we need to ensure that we are getting sustainable compact low-carbon balanced regional development. Perhaps the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage might look at what is happening today. Are the transport policies we are introducing today delivering the outcomes we want?

I agree with the Deputy that NIFTI is this lens. It is all about the national planning framework. If we are not meeting the objectives, we should be clear about that. As well as meeting climate plans we also need to meet those planning objectives, including town centre first. I am terrified that we will end up with local authority housing in the centres of cities and towns with still a mass evacuation of the better-off outside leaving us without the sustainable mass we need to make attractive vibrant communities using existing infrastructure and assets. While there is good co-operation between our Departments, we have a lot of work to do to get a detailed analysis of what is happening on the ground, not just at county level but down to the district electoral divisions. We will need to work on that project jointly.