Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

I wish to share time with Deputy Boyle. I want to concentrate on the element of the document referring to fostering family-friendly workplaces. This focuses on women returning to the workforce, which they are doing in ever increasing numbers. Clearly, people power put this issue much higher on the agenda when it was raised last March in the by-election campaigns of Meath and Kildare North. I hope we will see a response to that in the budget, because such a response is urgently needed.

Another issue does not seem to attract the same level of attention. People, mostly women, who take perhaps two or three years out from work when their children are young face a major disadvantage on their return to work. It is almost as if they are required to start at the bottom of the ladder in that very little note is taken of the experience they had prior to taking time out to care for their children. Some consideration needs to be given to incentivising the return to work, particularly where people have not been documented as long-term unemployed, as many of these individuals have not been. I regularly hear that they are seen as some sort of economic entity which has disadvantaged itself because the people involved have stepped out of the workforce. They should be viewed as having added benefit because at the times of most pressure in their lives they took time out to care for their children when they were very young.

A section of the document speaks of an infrastructural capacity and planning policy overcome through an effective NDP that sharply diminishes the infrastructure deficits which add to economic and social costs. That was in regard to transport, and the word "sharply" struck me because I have seen nothing sharply done in the area of public transport over the past ten years. It is an issue with which we must get to grips. For example, the AA has estimated that congestion costs in Dublin alone were in the region of €600 million last year. The AA might have quite a lot in common with our Green Party colleagues on that point.

I was one of a number of people who campaigned to have the Maynooth train line service doubled. That line goes through a catchment area of 250,000 people. It is not insignificant and was funded when the proposed third Luas line fell off the tracks, so to speak. So successful is the Maynooth train line that we are now talking of getting the train personnel from Tokyo, wearing their white gloves, to squeeze people onto the train because it is so packed.

We must get to grips with this issue if we are not to ask people to spend many hours in their cars, which is clearly unsustainable for the future.

See this speech in context