Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

That was the new initiative and the Government appears to have spurned it already. I simply asked the Taoiseach to lay the results of the evaluation before the House. The reason he did not indicate that he would do so was that no such evaluation has been done.

There is little point in referring to a protest which we — properly — organised when the trams or carriages were delivered during Senator O'Rourke's time as Minister for Public Enterprise when she was trying to make up her mind on whether to go underground or overground. The issue we were protesting against was the delay and serious cost overrun for the project. Since then, the Government has built five kilometres of tunnel in a project which has overshot by two years and €340 million. The Taoiseach now asks the House to believe the Government will build tunnels from Ballymun to Tallaght and the inner city to the airport. What kind of cloud cuckoo land does he believe the rest of us join him in? This only backs up the campaign we launched yesterday which the Taoiseach so resented.

The Government Front Bench comprises a shower of wasters who will not come in to the House to support the Taoiseach's grand plan. They misrepresent facts and expect us to buy a pig in a poke. The transport plan is purely a media event to try to get out of the hole in which the Government finds itself and the more it digs, the deeper the hole becomes, although it is not yet big enough to build a metro.

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