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

I do not see those figures.

If I may, the protection and renewal figure is pretty much being maintained. There will, in the next two to three years, be a switch in investment towards public transport as compared with roads investment. We will still be investing significantly in roads but the Government committed to a 2:1 ratio in favour of new public transport projects. The reality is there are certain critical public transport projects, such as Cork metropolitan rail, BusConnects in Cork, Dublin, Galway and Limerick, Waterford railway station being moved, DART+ heading out towards Maynooth in the west and the metro. There is a list as long as your arm of vital public transport projects which have not got sufficient funding in the past ten to 20 years. That investment will tend towards more public transport as compared to roads. It is not that we will not be building the roads programme but we will have to prioritise.

In response to the Deputy's question about whether we reopen the national development plan, NDP, to a certain extent I would love to reopen it now because I would be opening it and saying happily that we want more. We put in €70 billion worth of projects and we did well to get a €35 billion allocation within the NDP. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of Transport are probably the two Departments that got the biggest commitment. I am conscious that the Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Michael McGrath, would be nervous. We only agreed it last year and if one starts immediately amending it, one loses some of the certainty. One has to stick to the plan.

The real challenge for us is in the timelines or the length of time it takes to deliver. The reason it is expensive is that it takes so long. Our biggest constraint is on the planning side. There is a real problem. We have metro north in planning, DART+ in planning, Cork metropolitan rail in planning, BusConnects in planning in Dublin and BusConnects Galway in planning - I could go on and that is only in transport - and there is not real certainty in terms of when they will be coming out of planning.

There was one estimate given to me recently. Every week that we delay on the metro is costing us millions of euro and the real challenge is the speed with which we can consider some of these projects through the planning system. For roads and public transport and for all our projects, that is the biggest obstacle to getting infrastructure built and getting value for money for the State.