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

Yes. I am being very local but it is just to give an example. What is Donnybrook? Is Donnybrook a distributor road into the city or is it the centre for a community? There are certain examples coming out to me as I see it developing now, which give me hope that it could be a sense of community. Take one very local example. Let us go down to the bottom of Eglinton Road and look at that complex junction at Donnybrook church and the Dublin Bus garage. That development at the bottom of Eglinton Road is a really attractive development. I am sure there was lots of opposition to it; it is 11 storeys high but it actually enhances the sense of place. Similarly, across the road from it, we have got the greenway going along the River Dodder by Herbert Park. However, that greenway comes to an abrupt halt at that bridge and there is no really effective way across. If we are going to continue the greenway along the river, we need to rethink that very junction.

As part of that we could look at both RTÉ and the Dublin Bus garage, which are both on State land. As I said earlier, with respect to our planning system, how long have we been waiting for the site in RTÉ to be developed, which would hugely benefit Donnybrook, and give it a sense of a living community? Similarly, with regard to Dublin Bus, is it not beyond the bounds of our possibility, even though they are listed buildings as we electrify the buses there so they will be cleaner and quieter, that we could look to develop some of that site? We could start to make that Donnybrook crossroads a living place rather than what it is at the moment and has been for several decades, which is a motorway into the city. That does not work because it is congested.

Taking that as an example, I would love us to even pick up on what we did with the bus corridor there, to go further again, and really make Donnybrook, which is just one example, a village that is a centre of community life. The question is: is it a corridor or a community? Increasingly, we should be thinking of them as communities and making sure we have the scale, quality and speed of public transport so people can still get in and out, which we need to do. That is not impossible when you invest in buses. The biggest risk with those arguing against the Dublin city centre traffic management plans is that it cripples the bus network for the entire city. All our buses would end up stuck in the centre of the city trying to get through. The whole city is impacted by that, and that is why we need to put in the measures quickly and the money we are putting into BusConnects so that every corridor starts to be able to switch to public transport and become better places to live in.