Mr. Aebhric McGibney:

The population growth in Dublin has consistently been underforecast by the CSO for 20 years. We now use the M2 and F2 figures which use the 2011 census forecast for 2016, produced in 2013, but this was wrong by about 50,000 people. More and more people are moving into urban areas at a faster pace, much of it internal, rather than inward, migration. Transport and land use are the biggest modern-day crisis the city has and we need to join the two issues together in a consistent way. If we had built everything that was proposed under Transport 21 ten years ago, it would be finished by now. There would be a Metro North and an underground DART, as well as other services. There would also be less of a housing problem. The Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government gives figures showing a potential supply of 175,000 sites in the county of Dublin. It lists various categories, what is enabled and what not enabled, what has planning permission and water, roads, etc., but the failure to progress housing supply is lack of infrastructure, including water but also a transport system. If we could manage to integrate the two elements to allow the extra supply to come on board it would be a great help.

The chamber does not have an ideological position on PPPs and the question of public and private finance. We do not believe financing must be private just because we are a business body. In fact, most bundles or packages of finance are public and private finance working together. There is an expertise in regard to the EIB, of which we can avail. Capital spending, as a percentage of GDP, should be up at the level of the OECD and EU average, which is upwards of 4% - twice where we are at now. There should be a bundle of private and public finance on top of that, working together. The most important thing in using private finance is to have a consistent approach. In the past we have developed expertise and ramped up private finance on a range of projects and then walked back down the hill again without delivering the project. If one uses private finance one has to use it consistently.

On the question of a timeline, it is hard to break projects down into their component parts each year and to estimate what will be spent in each year. However, separating larger projects into bundles of smaller projects can allow little pieces to be done that can fit into the overall capital spending plan and can enable projects to be progressed more swiftly.