Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

We all agree that a longer-term horizon is welcome but the idea of such a horizon is that it gives certainty as to what projects will go ahead. That has not happened. There has been every effort to obfuscate about what is planned to hide the fact that nothing is happening. There have been five year plans. There have been national plans. There have been national envelopes of plans. There are plans which are about to be announced. They will take ten years. We do not know whether it is a nine year plan or an 11 year plan. In other words, projects are being dropped, hidden, delayed, put back in and taken out to the extent that nobody knows exactly what is happening. Would the Minister agree now that we know for certain from all the projections, that the population is increasing even faster than we expected, that there is a real need to start delivering on projects and that the rate of the population increase is far greater than the rate of delivery of public transport projects? There has been a large increase in investment in the DART. There has been an increase in investment in recent years in commuter rail. Despite the fact that Luas has taken 20 million trips off the roads in the year, we still see no net improvement because the population is growing at a much faster rate than that at which the Minister is delivering projects. Similarly, the last section of the motorway has been completed——

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