James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is my fear. Any public representative who cares about a capital project wants to see that it gets the Humphrey Appleby treatment by the Department and relevant State bodies. All we want is to push it along and get it done. When it takes 12 months to effectively get paperwork done, it is very obviously going to be the case that questions are going to arise from that.

I am also conscious that we had devastating flooding in east Cork. There is a need for us to basically call out the fact that the N25 has been shut on a number of occasions over the last decade. There is more traffic on a single lane on the main Cork to Waterford road. There are two lanes of traffic going to and from Cork and Waterford. There is more traffic on them than there is on the Galway to Limerick motorway and dual carriageway and the Waterford to Dublin road. We are doing that on an ordinary national route, which is of huge importance to the local economy.

I am not trying to knock the Minister or be critical of the Department. However, I do not know what I need to do to show the Minister how bad the congestion is there. It takes 15 or minutes. It is sad to say it, but this has cost people's lives. There have very sadly been multiple fatal accidents on that stretch of road. In addition to that, ambulances that need to go to and from Cork University Hospital, CUH, and hospitals in Cork from throughout east Cork and west Waterford get caught up there. I am begging the Minister to try to do what he can to push it on.