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

Before the Minister comes back in, I will comment on a matter Senator Horkan touched on. It is something I really want to talk about in relation to the airport and I do not want the Minister having to double up on his answers. The Senator was talking about the multimodal means of people getting to and from Dublin Airport. The Minister spent some time talking about capacity issues with the local road network and all the rest of it. Future capacity, however, is something equally important to me. By future, I mean when the Minister and I are at the grand opening of the metro in Lissenhall in eight or nine years.

We will then be able to get to the city centre in 25 minutes. However, people coming down the northern commuter corridor from Louth, Meath and north Dublin - I hope we will by then also have the beginnings of the Navan line reopening or DART+ West along the Kildare lines - will all have to get off at a DART station that interlinks with the metro to double back on themselves. When I say Meath, I mean both Meath by the sea and central Meath. They are two different Meaths as far as I am concerned. The point I am making is that not having a connection from Lissenhall or Clongriffin to the northern commuter line does not make an awful lot of sense from a long-term planning perspective using the mathematics the Minister mentioned earlier regarding the capacity of the road network. I just wanted to put my oar in on that one and to say that, as part of the implementation of the all-island strategic review within the Department of Transport, while the northern commuter connection from Clongriffin to the airport by heavy rail is mentioned, a continuation or Luas from Lissenhall to Donabate should be provided given the planning and spatial strategy capacity of Donabate that has been around since the 1990s and that is currently being delivered. That should happen at some point. It does not have the necessary population today but it will in ten or 15 years. Dublin Airport has been relatively successful at managing ground traffic. The percentage of journeys taken by bus is 35%, if I am not mistaken.