Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

I live in a commuter hell along with hundreds of thousands of people spending two to three hours getting in and out of Dublin daily. There is a massive cost in terms of spending money on cars but also a human cost of the pressure that puts on families. I have no doubt the level of anxiety among children is rising at the moment because parents are leaving at 7 a.m. and not back until 7 in the evening, etc. The majority of workers in my county leave the county every day to go to work. That happens in no other county. Navan is the biggest town in the country without a rail line. It is causing major difficulty for the people of Navan.

One of the major things I want to get out of this committee is to find out why infrastructurally things are taking so long and why they are costing so much. Those are the big questions we need to get to grips with.

Take the Navan to Dublin rail line. It was built in 1852 in three years with picks and shovels. The route option is taking three years at the moment. Why does the route option for the Navan to Dublin rail line take three years?