Mr. Tom O'Mahony:

Yes. The project was going to be the centrepiece of the public transport investment programme because it would have brought huge benefits to the city. Due to the situation that we have been in that project has not been affordable. It was a PPP project on a huge scale. For a period, and for reasons I do not need to go into, the PPP market was not interested in Ireland. In any case, the Exchequer was not in a position to fund the scheme with the necessary amount.

Earlier this year there was a court ruling on the railway order for the project. It means that if properties or lands must be acquired compulsorily for this project then notices to treat will have to be issued by September of next year. The court ruling reduced the period in which that must happen. A notice to treat has the effect of committing the State to buy the lands or properties concerned. Therefore, the Government must decide, before September of next year, whether the DART underground project will proceed. If the Government decides to proceed, the DART underground will be the major public investment project of the next seven or eight years.

As for investment priorities, there is a point that is generally not well understood and we did not fully understand the scale of it until we studied it. The fact is a huge amount of capital investment is required just to maintain the capital assets that we have, and that is without bringing anything new into the system. By that I mean properly maintaining the roads and also maintaining the rail network, which is extremely expensive. Over the past year, with the help of a lot of transport experts, we have done work on - and I think such work has never been properly done - trying to tie down precisely how much each year, on average, the State must invest in maintenance of the network. That is just to maintain it at a steady state so it does not deteriorate. The figure is higher than the figure we are currently spending on our total transport investment programme which is a significant issue. The Minister will publish the work that we have done on this issue in the form of a public information and consultation document. When the Government gets into planning the next capital investment programme, as it will do in the near future, and one which will presumably run for the next four or five years, we will make a case that before consideration is given to new roads or public transport schemes, full provision is made for the cost of maintenance.

Even before consideration is given to new road or public transport schemes, it is important to make full provision for the cost of maintenance. We have not been doing that for a few years. We can get away with that for a few years but it means, in the case of the roads, a point will be reached at which the remedial work needed on the roads, because we did not do steady maintenance, is more expensive in the long run. In the case of rail, we reach a point at which we must stop services on certain lines because an inability to properly maintain railway lines is giving rise to potential safety issues. The major issue for us in respect of transport investment for the foreseeable future will be making sure we have enough to properly maintain the network that has already been invested in at a cost of billions of euros over recent years.