Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

We would be delighted to send out the jobs and the housing as well because we have enough of both in Dublin West. We will send some of the people too if he wishes. In a previous incarnation, when I was a mere young Fine Gaeler, I gave the then Taoiseach, John Bruton, much abuse for not opening the train line to Navan. I certainly hope the Minister will do that.

Obviously everyone in the House welcomes the introduction of barrier-free tolling which is long overdue. It is nothing new in any other country. I have been to Norway where there has not been barrier-tolling since the 1970s. The people there were amused and bemused at the thought that a country like Ireland still has barrier tolling. Even in Washington, its airport motorway is all tolled by a camera system that reads one's licence plate and, if one breaks it twice or three times, the matter proceeds through the courts. That technology has been there for more than a decade. It is a indictment on the Government and the Civil Service that it has taken us so long to get this far.

The issue of the M50 toll bridge is of particular concern to my constituency, at least half of which is located in Dublin West. Deputy Brady suggested recently that the M3 should be named after the Minister. I suggest we rename the M50 toll bridge, the Bertie Ahern bridge or, perhaps, even more appropriately, the Burke bridge, after Ray Burke. That would be a fitting tribute to both of both of those men, given what they have done to commuters in Dublin.

The toll bridge, as most people are aware, was a sweetheart deal between the Government and NTR. Not only did they make the deal once, when the second bridge was built the deal was made all over again. The present position is that NTR's return on that investment will be in the region of 2,000%. Not since Jack bought his magic beans did anyone make such a good investment. I certainly hope we will never make that mistake again.

The provision for rest stops is long overdue. I suggest caution in selecting the location of rest stops and on giving local authorities too much power to designate them. I am aware that a number of herd-owners and business men across the country have designated their field or farm as a rest stop. For example, there is one area beside the M50 toll bridge where the owner of that particular ten acres would like to develop a rest stop. I cannot think of anywhere less appropriate for a rest stop than beside the toll bridge. I ask the Minister to be very careful in regard to the regulations he draws up to select the location of rest stops because if they are in the wrong place they will become a source of congestion.

I welcome the change of rules in regard to the designation of motorways although I do not know why this did not happen sooner. There are various sections of the N2 that are really motorway but have to be called N2, and the signage has to be the N2, because of the current legislation. That change is long overdue.

On the M50 upgrade, Deputy Reilly and others asked whether we would soon learn if the upgrade to three lanes would not be adequate. We already know from the information available that the upgrading of the M50 to three lanes and the upgrading of the interchanges will not be adequate. I suggest the development of the outer ring road, which should be at an advanced stage. There is no question that, sooner or later, we will need to have a proper outer ring road stretching, perhaps, as far north as Balbriggan and all the way around to Blessington and Bray. I expect to see that outer ring road well under way during the term of this Government. If we build an outer ring road it is important that the areas on either side are protected from development in order that we do not make the same mistakes as with the M50, which essentially became a magnet for development when it should have been a limit to the city.

Among the issues on the M50 that have not been resolved are noise and sound. Noise barriers are being put in place in some areas but in many others they are not. Those living alongside the M50 are subject to horrible disruption from noise and major devaluation to their properties. That is not the case in other countries. Anyone who visits Australia will see how its motorways are landscaped and how perspex tunnels and perspex barriers are put in place to keep out the sound. There is also the question of air pollution given that the levels of nitrous oxide in much of my constituency in the vicinity of the M50 exceed the recommended limits.

There is an issue in regard to forward planning for motorways that has not been properly addressed. Deputy Reilly expressed the view that the M1 will have to be upgraded to a much larger motorway. It is obvious we will need the eastern motorway on the sea side of the city to link up the M50 to the east and the completion of the city motorways. In some of the Nordic countries a system is used whereby all motorways are more or less provided by the private sector. They are all tolled and the toll is in place until the motorway has paid for itself and a certain profit for the private sector has been made after which the road reverts to the state with a considerably lower toll. That would seem to be the way to develop motorways across the country without expending any public money in developing them. Having done that all that money could be invested in public transport, particularly railways, which is where investment is needed.

We have mentioned Kells and Navan already. It is clear that regardless of what is done with the roads we will have major congestion on all those routes unless we upgrade public transport considerably. For many years in my constituency we have been asking for the DART to be extended to Dublin 15. The train service in my area, which I use, is greatly oversubscribed. It is not uncommon for people to faint on it or to be left on the platform. Despite considerable improvements in the frequency of service and length of carriages and the recent opening of the Docklands station, I was amazed that within a few weeks of the station opening the train was already full in Castleknock and was unable to pick up passengers in Ashtown, Broombridge and further down the line, which proves the massive latent demand for DART-type train services in other parts of the city.

Extending DART services to Maynooth appears to be the last item on the Transport 21 agenda after metro north and metro west. It is an enormous policy error to proceed with major land acquisition and tunnelling to build metro north and metro west — having metro west may be questionable — yet we are putting on the long finger the considerably easier job of electrifying the Maynooth line and reopening the Navan line, which could be done without the purchase of land and without planning delays.

Today the route options for the interconnector were published. I suppose this is welcome — they all look more or less the same to me. It appears that it will be at least 2015 before the interconnector will be in place. The interconnector is the crucial infrastructure to integrate our public transport network and allow people to get to where they want to go. Commuting has changed in Dublin. People no longer simply commute from the suburbs to the city centre, they commute from one suburb to another. They may live in Blanchardstown, work in Tallaght, shop in Dundrum and go to the airport and Swords. Without having a proper interlinked mesh of transport, we will get nowhere on public transport. I do not expect any major improvements in the next five years, which is disappointing. It may be the next government under this party that will open the interconnector, metro north and metro west. We will be happy to do that, but it is disappointing that it will take so long.

The introduction of integrated ticketing is crucial. While Iarnród Éireann and Dublin Bus claim we have integrated ticketing to a certain extent, that is not the case. It is still not possible to travel from Luas to bus or bus to DART while using the same ticket. It is not complicated and does not require much expenditure. We do not need detailed review groups and we do not need all the technology being proposed. It would be possible to take a model from any other city with concentric zones or whatever we wanted to use and introduce it within six months if the political will existed. Unfortunately the political will has been lacking for the past ten years and it remains to be seen whether the new Minister has the will to do it.

The same applies to planning guidelines. Motorways and roads do not stand on their own, but are crucially interlinked with how we develop our country. The more sprawl we have and the more inappropriately we develop towns around the country the more we will need roads, whereas what we all know we should be doing is limiting the size of our towns and cities and developing high quality housing at higher densities in existing built-up areas in brownfield sites near to transport nodes. As part of the Seanad election trail when I was canvassing around the country with Pascal Donoghue, who I hope will soon join us in the Seanad, I got to see the Westmeath county development plan. In a five-year development plan serious consideration is being given to increase by 500% or 600% the size of many small towns in Westmeath, including towns I had not heard of before going there. It took centuries or even a millennium to get those towns to their existing level.

We are now seriously considering allowing those towns to increase fivefold or sixfold in the space of five or six years. Obviously, the net consequence will be huge numbers of people on the roads who will need to travel elsewhere for employment and education. Those are the planning mistakes that have been made in the past ten years, leading to the development of huge towns like Celbridge, Leixlip and even Blanchardstown, whereas high quality, high density housing could have been developed nearer to the city.

I hope the new Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government will have the courage of his convictions, or at least the convictions he used to have, to throw out the development plans in Meath, Kildare, Laois and Offaly, and advise them that we cannot continue to develop the country in that way because the cost of developing sewerage systems and motorways is phenomenal. We need to reconsider how planning is carried out and it needs to be done properly. Green Party Members no longer seem to attend the Chamber except for divisions. I warn them that if they do not honour the commitment to introduce proper planning, another party, Fine Gael, will take up the mantle and supplant it as the party of proper planning and appropriate development.

It behoves me to welcome the aspects of the Bill that relate to barrier-free tolling, rest stops and the change in the definition of motorways. However, I cannot do so without emphasising the huge disappointment among the public in the way transport has been mismanaged in the past ten years. Unfortunately, I do not have confidence that when we go to the country in four or five years' time things will be dramatically different.

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