Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will come in on that specific item because when people think of BusConnects, they think it is a few new buses and a few new drivers, and they ask why it will take until 2030 and potentially beyond to deliver it. The reason, of course, is that the infrastructure requires change and sacrifice. There are communities up and down this city, and I am sure in other cities where BusConnects is being rolled out, that will have to endure inconvenience for that infrastructure to be built in.

In the county town of Swords in my constituency, during the initial phase of discussions about where the bus lanes would go within certain communities, there were objections to the removal or moving of boundary walls of estates that were 5 m, 10 m or 50 m from the nearest homes. If we maintain that attitude, it will be 2040 before the bus lanes are put in. All members are out knocking on people's doors these days. There are probably tens of thousands of volunteers and would-be Members of these Houses knocking on doors. There needs to be that realisation that if we are not prepared to allow for that structural change to happen, particularly within this city, then it will not happen and those services cannot be provided in a reliable way, such that the ghost buses on the app, to which the Minister of State referred, do not persist and we do not end up with three buses showing up at the same time because they are all in the same bottleneck. There has to be an element of reality injected into the conversation about how these infrastructural projects come about and, indeed, how they are delayed. I get quite annoyed about it, to be frank with the Minister of State, particularly when certain arteries within the south city are talked about with some sort of fondness for the past. The reality is that, as a Government, through climate action commitments and, indeed, commitments by the Department of Transport and its agencies, trees that might be removed will be replaced and, although the aesthetic is being lost, the benefit far outweighs that, in my humble opinion.