Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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I have one last point, and it is coming back to what Deputy O'Callaghan said. It is the democratic thing. In some ways, the purpose of a directly elected mayor would be to get national agencies like the NTA to do things that it may not want to do, or that it may have good reasons for not doing. The NTA might have a national focus, and a Dublin mayor would say, "Yes, that is your national focus but for Dublin, we want a bigger slice of the cake or we want this prioritised". It is difficult asking a national agency to do things that would be this specific.

I am thinking about Deputy O'Callaghan's point around the roll-out of specific projects, for example, in the Drumcondra-Santry area. There was consultation around the first phase of the metro north, then there was consultation around the bus rapid transit, BRT project. Then metro north changed, and they were no longer part of that project. Then the core bus corridor, CBC project came out and we are progressing on that. For all of those decisions, I cannot think of any democratic input as to why any one of those were or were not a priority. Those decisions are made as part of a consultation process but ultimately, who decided that BRT should or should not go ahead? Who decided that cycle lanes should or should not go ahead? Of course, cycle lanes are needed but my point is, there is often no democratic mandate for the prioritisation of the projects that are put out there, or a decision that a Luas to Finglas might be more important than a Luas to the Dublin mid-west area. Does the NTA accept that it has a lot of free rein at the moment without that level of local democratic input, or fragmented input as it is at present?