Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

The greatest failure of the Government is in the area of transport and land use planning. It will leave us a legacy of a difficult, impaired quality of life for generations to come. I would not put the Members opposite me who have acted as Ministers in charge of a car park in an empty field at a garden fete. They have proved themselves incompetent, witless, illogical, uninspired, craven to vested interests and, on crucial occasions, corrupt in some of the decisions that they have made to my mind. They have left us with the massive problem that we can see developing every day on our roads.

The reasons for that failure are clear. There has been an absolute lack of investment in public transport. In 2006 we will spend six times more on new roads than on public transport in the capital programme. Even though we have set aside a significant sum of money for public transport next year, I do not believe it will be spent because no rail projects will be developed, such is the poor planning that has taken place. I mentioned corruption because it is part of the problem. If we look at the planning that has accompanied road development, we notice that major stores have been put adjacent to motorways against the best planning advice, which is now causing much of our gridlock problems.

There is also a broader planning failure as the Government starved cities such as Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and elsewhere, which could have been real alternatives to Dublin. These are centres where we could provide public transport and other services to attract development and investment away from the capital city. I pity the next Government that has to undo and repair this damage, as it will have a very difficult task.

I agree with the broad intent of the Labour Party motion, but I disagree with one aspect. I do not believe that park and ride facilities will provide a substantial solution to our problems. It has been proven in many international reports that they do not provide significant capacity, that they cost a great amount in land use and provision and people simply do not use them to the extent required to provide a real solution. The main solution will be in the provision of fixed rail services, which will allow for a fast and high quality public transport system, with the development of the crucial softer modes of walking and cycling. In conjunction with proper planning, these modes of transport can deliver a healthy, vigorous, economically advantaged city.

Bus services provide a crucial interim measure which will help us get through the difficult times this Government's bad planning will cause. We need an emergency plan to provide bus services to try to take people off the road and reduce current congestion, while waiting for the development of long-term rail solutions. That will require flexibility in the running of bus services, which should involve a regulator establishing new bus routes and directing Dublin Bus and private operators to alter services so that more frequent, high quality services can be provided. To do that, we need to provide radical road space for such services to make sure they arrive on time.

I was flabbergasted at the latest ideas of Deputy Fiona O'Malley on how the problem might be solved, when her party has utterly failed in government to do anything about it for the last ten years. It is interesting to look at the manifesto of the Progressive Democrats Party in 2002, which promised a metro and all sorts of rail and bus services by 2007. In five years the party has done nothing. The people should vote on that legacy on transport planning next May, by voting this incompetent Government out of office.

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