Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

The use of road transport for domestic traffic is not environmentally friendly, so the use of railways for rapid transport will be the thing of the future. There will always be cars as we cannot walk everywhere and there are parts of the country that are not served by rail. There are many parts of my constituency that are not served by rail, even though many of the towns are so served. In future, facilities in car parks will be on-line to ensure parked vehicles are charged. That has huge potential and the whole way of life we have come to know will be changed. We will make many of these changes of our own volition, some of the changes will be forced upon us and we may have to respond to other changes as a matter of extreme urgency.

I travelled into this city late this morning because I was at the opening of the new Intel facility in Leixlip. The tailback starts at the Newcastle Road junction beyond Lucan and continues all the way to the M50 interchange at Palmerstown. The person responsible for this should be asked to focus his or her attention on what is going on here. I counted trucks and cars for two miles moving a few feet at a time. They cannot get off the N4 to get onto the M50 and they are losing fuel at a great rate. At the same time, the ozone layer is going up in smoke.

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