Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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If I could just make the point, it was a critical project we had spent ten to 12 years planning and preparing. We would have got it for half nothing in the middle of the recession and it would be opening now. It was the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that killed the project through a supplicant and unfortunate Minister with responsibility for transport, who was one of the Deputy's own colleagues. That is who killed it at the very time we should have built it. We would have got funding. It was the perfect countercyclical infrastructure investment project.

I also must disagree with the Deputy who said it would be great if we all travelled long distances in. I could not agree more with Ms Mary Rose Burke from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. I was in London at the weekend. One should look at what our competitor cities are doing. I was near Bermondsey, an area that was empty 15 years ago but which is now packed and within walking distance of the City of London. That is what we should be aiming for and it is what we are competing against. Do we want to go to Bermondsey or some other area? The Government published a website recently which sets out the massive extent of public land available to us which is close to the centre but which we are under-utilising. That is what we need to develop.

Having made that general case, I have some further points. I am glad Ms Burke mentioned the need for investment in cycling infrastructure, albeit it is not listed among the chamber's priority. I would place it as the first priority in Dublin because in terms of immediate responses, we have six projects which are ready to go. The Liffey cycle route currently has approximately 1,000 cyclists and a similar number of motorists. If we get the same 50% increase in cycling capacity there that we did on the Grand Canal, it will be the most immediate capacity response to adopt. That is what London, Paris and New York are doing. It is what our competing cities are doing. It is not just the Liffey cycle route, it is the College Green project which was announced yesterday and the Sutton-to-Sandycove project which would make a very nice cycle from Dún Laoghaire into town. It is the Dodder greenway, the Santry greenway and the Tolka greenway. These are projects we have been planning for decades and which are close to being ready to go but which have no funding and, I must say, not enough political support. When the Liffey cycle route was before the council last week, we saw that there was insufficient political support. That is a real problem. They are not necessarily cheap. To do the Sutton-to-Sandycove route properly would require a fair bit of funding. Cycling is not just the tail end of spending, but should be 10% of our transport budget. In Dublin, those are the six arterial congestion solving, capacity improving, lifestyle enhancing projects which should be the No. 1 priority ahead of all the other projects the witnesses mentioned. Either we do them now or we give up on trying to make Dublin a safe cycling city. Having spent 25 years trying to achieve that, the Dublin cycling campaign deserves the support of the Chamber of Commerce in relation to those projects.

I disagree fundamentally with the Chamber of Commerce on the need for an outer orbital or eastern bypass. One cannot say on the one hand that we need to invest in public transport and then on the other hand dangle the prospect of massive new road projects. We are already doing that with the widening of the N7 which should not be coming ahead of public transport projects. There is no demand of any scale to justify the multi-billion cost of an eastern bypass for people to get from Stillorgan and its environs to the airport. If we are going to build a metro to the airport, let that take them there. There is no demand for that road. In any of the modelling I have seen from the Dublin transportation office or elsewhere, there is no crowd of people looking to get from the southside of Dublin to Whitehall or Balbriggan or any point in between. If there is, they should be using the DART and the metro. We do not need an eastern bypass and even less do we need an outer orbital. The outer orbital simply fits into the mad IBEC policy presented to us here regarding 1,500 km of motorways nationally as if climate change did not exist and as if we had learned nothing in terms of sprawl and the doughnutting of our cities which has gone on in the last 20 or 30 years. The Chamber of Commerce has said on the one hand it wants to stop the doughnut effect but on the other it has included the outer orbital in its submissions, which is to build another ring around the doughnut. That does not make sense.