Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Most movements observed in that time related to the moving arms of trainee gardaí, frantically trying to push the traffic forward, but there was nowhere for it to go. Had the most famous stable in history been sited on the Blanchardstown roundabout, Mary and Joseph would have got quicker from Mulhuddart on their ass this morning than their unfortunate fellow travellers, all of 2,000 years later — and would have breathed fresh air all the way. Had they tried public transport this morning, they would have found as little room there as they did in the historic inn. In short it is a disaster, and what is true of Blanchardstown is true of the greater Dublin area. As my Independent colleagues tell me, it is being replicated right across the State in different ways.

Ministers, including the Taoiseach, are completely cosseted from this daily grind and do not appreciate that commuters are at breaking point, not because of the exceptional debacle we had last Wednesday on the N11, but because of the daily debacle they have to fight through.

The Taoiseach must not patronise the House with his usual response to the effect that this is the price of economic success. It is the price of 40 years of corruption of the planning system. Far more insidious than the bribes in brown envelopes to council minnows is the domination of Governments — particularly Fianna Fáil Governments — by the ethos of utterly selfish land developers and speculators. This includes people on the Taoiseach's watch over the last ten years to whom he has given carte blanche to put up tens of thousands of houses and apartments and walk away with obscene profits leaving new communities desperately struggling with an infrastructural void of horrific proportions.

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