Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I join my colleagues in supporting this reasoned and reasonable motion which, no doubt, the reasonable Minister, Deputy Cullen, will accept. The Labour Party did not table this motion because it is opposed to progress or because it does not recognise the chronic traffic problem confronting Meath and other parts of the country. In many respects, traffic jams are the problems of success and I would prefer to have those problems than the alternatives. That said, however, the measure of our ability to deal with such success is how we handle these problems but it should not be informed by our past attitudes.

I remind the Minister of some of our attitudes from the past. Wood Quay immediately comes to mind. It was a stubborn clash between officials and professionals — some from the National Museum and others from the department of medieval studies at UCD. In the case of Wood Quay, there was an obstinacy driven by a sense from some officials that once they had made a decision they could not be seen to reverse it because somehow or other this would be a loss of face.

There is no loss of face involved in this case but there is a potentially serious loss of heritage and no one wants that epitaph to be written on their professional career. Fast-forwarding from Wood Quay, we should ask ourselves what lessons we learnt from Mullaghmore and Luggala about that assertive statist attitude that says the State can do no wrong and does not need to listen to third parties — that once the internal experts have come to a view, nobody else could have a better or more informed view and that the State, in effect, is above the law. The State attempted to hold that view until such time as the Supreme Court said "No". As an agent acting on behalf of the citizens of this Republic, the State must abide by the same laws on planning and development as other institutions. It was a good day for planning when local and State authorities were obliged to go through the planning process.

The Minister has experience of the NRA in his own constituency. If this was a once off, accidental casualty of judgment perhaps we might be a bit more understanding and tolerant. Let us start with the Kildare by-pass, however, and the dismissive ignoring of warnings about the environmental impact of that by-pass. What happened concerning the delays? The commuters of south and mid-Kildare were just as inconvenienced by the delays when trying to get through Kildare town as were the commuters of Meath whom Deputy Shortall described earlier. Yet, because of an obstinacy of decision making at official level, this matter was taken to the courts — as was the right of those involved, invoking legislation the Government had supported — and the delays and their cost, both direct and indirect, were piled on the community in the form of stress in a myriad of ways.

The problem does not stop there because we have also had the Carrickmines experience. Whatever about corruption in the decision making and rezoning of the alignment of a road going through an area where the site was already known to have some archaeological artefacts, which could never be fully ascertained until the excavations were completed, the obstinacy of the NRA and those who are politically responsible for it seems to suggest an attitude of: "Put your head down, keep going. It'll be all right on the day and, sure, we'll push it through". Whatever options there were in respect of maintaining progress on the wider M50 road in the vicinity of Carrickmines, that is not an option now.

We have not stopped learning from our recent experiences. The Minister himself is deeply concerned about the implications of the site in Waterford. Anybody who had read Carty's Irish History — and God knows that was not a very accurate historical analysis of archaeological artefacts in the 1950s and 1960s — would have said that at the confluence of those three rivers, slightly further upstream from where the city of Waterford is located, one was likely to find within 100 metres of the banks of the river some archaeological remains. Yet for reasons, perhaps related to cost or to engineering and mechanical efficiency, a route was selected which to everybody's surprise, as Donnchadh Ó Corráin has said, is perhaps the largest Viking site of significance to be found this century and possibly ever in Europe.

The Labour Party is pointing out that we have been here before. This is not some new accident. There is a pattern and a legacy of archaeological remains — originally calculated to be only five and which Deputy Gilmore has now announced are of the order of 38, which is one for every 370 metres. It will make the lawyers' fees in tribunals of inquiry look like chickenfeed by the time we get out of the courts if this matter proceeds down the legal path we seem destined to follow if the Government proceeds with this proposal.

We are not suggesting the Government should stop and build nothing because we recognise, as has been said, that we need a traffic resolution. On the Cavan corridor we are clearly saying that north of Navan and south of Dunshaughlin the route is not in contestation and the NRA should proceed. However, within that space alternatives exist, some of which have been mentioned by Deputy Shortall. On this side of the House we cannot take the Executive decisions to reverse the decision-making process that has already been statutorily completed. Only the Government can do that.

We are not trying to force the Minister to lose face. We do not say the NRA is a bad organisation. On the contrary, the activities of the NRA probably provide us with the best archaeological opportunity the nation and our culture has conceivably ever had. We will dig up more of this land than ever before with far greater safeguards than prevailed when the railways were built in the century before last at a time when no protection existed. We do not even know if we have everything that was found. Anything that was discovered was found by accident.

We now have a legislative structure, trained archaeologists — while not enough of them, far more than before — and an opportunity to do something that will allow people in 500 years' time to say, "Wasn't that some generation of Irish people, who notwithstanding their need to resolve all the problems of commuting, stress and strain, held back, looked at the matter again and decided to stop for the time being." We should not walk away from the matter. Let us just hold and see what we can find.

Archaeological techniques are developing and will continue to develop in terms of scientific imaging and all sorts of electronic surveillance that can enable us to ascertain in advance before putting a spade in the ground that the probability of finding something is much higher than we could have known ten, 15 or 20 years ago. It is not just what is found that is important from the point of view of analysis and interpretation but also where it is found and its relationship to other parts, places and spaces. We do not know enough about our past and we have an obligation and responsibility, if not a duty, to maximise its conveyance into the future for our children and grandchildren.

The Minister is at this point. We are not asking him to stop or walk away. We are saying he should just pause. The Minister has the ability, power and responsibility to make this pause. He should then proceed without delay with what can be done. He should consider the options that can maximise traffic efficiency and minimise traffic delays by proceeding with the three bypasses to which Deputies Gilmore and Shortall have already referred. In the short term, it would be possible to improve the flow of traffic in Dunshaughlin, Kells and Navan. This would not be wasted money. Nobody in Kinnegad today feels that the small mini-bypass around that village represents wasted money, as I am sure Deputy Cassidy would agree.

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