Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

That the Taoiseach needed to be dragged kicking and screaming is exactly my point. He never accepted that conclusion and I question his competence and management of this project, which was epitomised by a mistake he refused to recognise. I do not know for how many years he has been a Minister or Taoiseach — it must be the guts of 20 to 25 years — but perhaps the concept of walking to an event is alien to him or far removed from his experience. As he arrives at everything with a star in front of his bonnet, it does not matter to him whether the star leads him west to Abbotstown or takes him on the short run from St. Luke's to Croke Park. However, if I want to bring my sons to a game, I must walk or go by bus. This is a fundamental issue that changes the nature of the city.

I have never had an opportunity to set out my views on that decision or the Taoiseach's performance but will do so now. It was the greatest example of incompetence in planning and epitomised to a certain extent the lack of planning and concern within our city in respect of the creation of what is known as the doughnut city, whereby we are starting to put everything around the M50. Ikea will go to the north slip road of Ballymun, we were going to put our national sports campus out there and, this morning, I read that the Minister for Transport is considering putting a centralised bus service point on the edge of the city.

When I examine these series of decisions in pure planning terms, I see that an edged city — turning Dublin into the equivalent of Houston, Dallas or another American car-based transport system city — does not work. More than anything else, it impinges on the social capital that the Taoiseach says is his mantra, and Mr. Robert Putnam's belief that we must build up strong communities. We must do this by proper transport planning first and foremost. On the one hand, the Taoiseach espouses this concept and, on the other, he insists that developments such as sports stadiums are located out of town rather than in the city centre. Happily, the Government has finally decided to locate the stadium in the city centre.

Beyond the stadium, the development of the sports campus is a slightly different matter. If we are examining the development of an area where professional athletes go for a period of time to train and hone their skills, planning with a particular civic sense is less important. As a south side resident of the city and as much as I would love to bring my children to the aquatic centre, I have not done so because there are no proper public transport connections in my constituency. If this authority must set its agenda when it is established and forgetting about Deputy Harkin or representatives from other parts of the country who may need to drive to these facilities, what public transport links would it provide for my children on the south side of the city? We are not far away from the facilities, only ten or 20 miles away, but going by car via the M50 would take hours. It is an unpredictable voyage.

The first task of any national sports campus authority is to determine how it will become a national and city one in terms of ready access. Currently, that access is not available to me. If the Government and sports authorities believe that this centre on the M50 is the place to put professional elite training facilities that can also be used by the public, so be it. I have a lesser problem with that than I do with the concept of a civic centre, the national stadium, being out there.

Something on which the Minister of State with special responsibility for children might have a view is that the large expenditure on this project contrasts with my experience of large numbers of children growing up in Dublin and other parts of the country without the simple facilities to play games in primary schools. I can only speak about primary schools as I have more direct experience of them, but I am sure the same is also true of a number of secondary schools. Children in my constituency do not have basic facilities to play a game of football in their schools or the curricula set out to rate sport where it should be, that is, a central tenet in the development of a child or young man or woman.

While our country has advanced and modernised in many different ways, I see no real change in modern thinking or an emphasis placed on this central aspect of our development as people, that is, our ability to partake in and express ourselves through sporting activities. The absence of participation at the youngest level organised by the State rather than in a private manner is remarkable. The considerable development of facilities on a professional or elite basis should always come second to the promotion of the involvement of all children, men and women. I contend that in a sense, this is the test of our success as a society, not how many Olympic medals we garner or professional athletes we have working at a particular level.

I would take my sporting cue from Con Houlihan, a sports journalist and writer who I have admired for many years. As a Kerryman, Deputy Deenihan may know him better than I, but in reading his writing, what was remarkably strong was the aspect of always returning to the local level, the battle between the local village or parish team against a neighbouring parish team, which epitomised all the great elements of sport. It did not need to be a professional, elite and segregated specialist activity. Con Houlihan's vision of what sport represents is the glory of the locality. If we move down the road of sport representing the elite and highly honed who do not have that connection to the local community or sense of place, it will not be as rich an experience.

In principle, I do not oppose the development of such a campus, which would promote excellence, but believe that it must be balanced by proper investment in the local, the primary school, the parish hall and the local pitch on behalf of the State. Unfortunately, like many I question the competence of this Government to get this matter right.

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