Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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It is a very useful response, which obviously follows on from our hearing and some issues that we had asked to follow up. That is always very helpful. Page 5 gives information with regard to tolls and the M50 e-Flow system, with figures for 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. These are very similar to some of the figures I got back by way of parliamentary questions. I believe, however, that they are exclusive of legal costs relating to debt recovery and private investigation costs. Can we just double-check with TII that this is the case? If it is, can we amend the figures and show those particular aspects separately also? That would be useful.

My second point is about the M7 bypass. It is 36 years since there was an initial project. These projects have a very long lifespan and we have had a number of them in Kildare. After 20 years or so, they will strip out the pavement and do a substantial four or five inches of tarmac, or even more, to give it some extra longevity. TII have said that it does not have the original data on costs and so on. It would be quite useful to ask TII how long it holds on to material. There can be a validity to this, and institutional memory can be lost. Holding on to some records is quite important. It would be useful if we could establish with TII the length of time it holds on to records.

My final point is on the metro and the Luas green line. There is a huge amount of development happening in the Cherrywood, Sandyford and Dundrum area. They are saying that they have no plans for any expansions there and they may well elongate it. It would be useful to ask TII if it is aware of the extent of the work that is happening there - it is actually breathtaking how much it changes even over a 12-month period - and why TII would not take into consideration the extent of the development. What we tend to get here, and we all complain about it, is infrastructure in retrospect rather than in parallel. It can be a real source of frustration because people have an expectation when there is a lot of housing that there will be the services and facilities to go along with that. A lot of that development is intended to be low-car or no-car use. It is deliberately built along the public transport corridor there. It is important that we do not have a short-term view on that, given the magnitude of the development happening there. We should go back to TII to ask it what the rationale is.