Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I think the reference document to read to give some background is the summer economic statement of last year, which set out what additional capital expenditure will cost the Government in each of the years 2024, 2025 and 2026. Roughly, if I recall correctly, it will be €250 million in 2024, €730 million in 2025 and €1.3 billion in 2026. Obviously, we, along with other Departments, are looking for as much of that as possible. If I could spend it straight away, some of the first things I would use it for would be EV charging infrastructure, more active travel and improving the digital technologies. When you go to other cities, you see contactless payments with credit card or other systems and we need to invest in that type of technology. I am keen to get as much as possible of the 2024 budget, in particular, enhanced.

The reality in the Department of Transport, however, is slightly different from that in other Departments, although perhaps every Minister would say that, because the investment we need to scale up is a multiple of their figures. We have a very useful €35 billion allocation for the full ten-year period. On the graph presented in the briefing document, if we continue on the €2.6 billion a year trajectory, to fully spend the €35 billion we would have to dramatically ramp up spending post 2026. To a certain extent, there was scepticism in some quarters as to whether we would be able to spend our budget and whether projects would come through the planning system, and people were waiting to see whether we would really get the projects through. I am convinced this year that we will and this relates to the likes of the metro, the Navan rail line, Cork metropolitan rail, BusConnects, DART+, the cross-city service in Galway, the Moyross-Ballysimon-Limerick-Shannon Foynes upgrade and the western rail corridor, which will not go to planning this year but we have started on it. So many projects are about to come into the view of being ready to be built, not least on the public transport side, and the scale of investment we will need to make is way beyond anything being considered within this broad NDP discussion. That is where we are going to have to really look at ways of being able to deliver, because I do not think we will want to stop any of the projects I just mentioned. Everyone has to be honest.

I could go on with examples. There is also the extension of the DART to Wicklow, investment in the electrification of the DART to Balbriggan, the new charging station in Drogheda, which we will fund, and putting in that new charging station in Wicklow in order that we can run the DART to there. I am only warming up here. We have a challenge on the public transport side that is beyond compare, and we need to look at various ways of making sure we will not do what happened in the past. If I were topping up money this year, I would put it into the EV charging infrastructure first. We have a real issue in transport. We are going to have to have a significantly greater capital budget and that is not going to be an easy ask, but we will do it.