Seymour Crawford (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this necessary Bill. Unfortunately, I concur with the previous speaker that we do not seem to have any other choice but to go into the lobbies and vote against the Bill. Once again, we are setting up a separate organisation that is not accountable to the House and that is very serious. We have set up the Health Service Executive, the National Roads Authority and many other bodies and we should have learned from them. My colleague, Deputy Reilly, has learned in the past 12 months what it is like to deal with the HSE. I have been dealing with it a lot longer and it is an absolute nightmare.

We are meeting officials from the HSE next Friday and even at this stage we do not know what the structure of the meeting will be. We will get to meet them at 12 noon and people will get tired and leave for lunch before it is too late. The type of structure we have in place already suggests that nobody will be answerable to anybody. People will give us a spin to try to make us believe they are doing something. I find the independent structures that are being set up frightening. We provided €16 billion for the health service, yet centres like my own hospital in Monaghan are far worse off than they were 30 years ago when there was no money in this State. I ask the Minister to rethink his approach before it is too late. It has been shown that this type of independent structure does not solve anything and will not solve the traffic problems.

I was prompted to speak in the debate because of traffic chaos. I come into the city from the north side, more recently via the M1. I appreciate the tremendous improvements made to that road and to the roads through Ardee to my home town of Monaghan. I can travel that 75 mile journey in approximately an hour and a quarter keeping within the speed limit, as I do not need to enter any towns. However, when I arrive at the Dublin Port tunnel the whole place is jammed up. The road has been restructured by modern designers and I cannot understand how they came up with their plan.

On one occasion when the tunnel was out of order and a lorry got a puncture on the road into it, I was delayed for an hour and a quarter without moving my car. That was a joke and is proof of the need for a management structure. If I had done something wrong, I am sure the Garda would have been with me in a short time but I could not move my car for an hour and a quarter on that occasion. When I raised the matter in the House, a joke was made of it. However, it is not a joke for the many thousands of people driving on business or in a private capacity who sit in traffic chaos every day of the week. Time is money and we are wasting an unbelievable amount of time and money with the current structures.

We all talk about the environment and the need to cut down on our emissions. We have been told that we will have to kill off some of our cows because of their emissions at a time when there is a scarcity of food. We have cars and vans sitting in traffic chaos wasting time and causing emissions that cannot or should not be justified. We need to put some structures in place, but we need political accountability for them. I urge the Minister to rethink the situation before it is too late. If the Minister proceeds with this authority and all the other structures, the Government should consider curtailing the number of Ministers. If all the business that was dealt with by Ministers reasonably well in the past is handed over to outside bodies, what call is there for all the Ministers, especially Ministers of State?

We have a fuel crisis at the minute, yet we have cars, vans and lorries belching out fumes at a cost not only to individual drivers, but also to the nation. I want to make some proposals for the Minister to consider in the short term. Deputy Barrett has already touched upon some of them. Most Oireachtas Members have had the advantage of travelling to other cities over the years and we have seen how transport systems work. For example, in Canada, if a vehicle contains three or more people it is automatically entitled to travel in the bus lane. Can something like that not be brought about here in the short term to alleviate the problem? It would not cost money. All it takes is a bit of common sense and restructuring. It would immediately encourage people going to business, work etc. to join together in order to travel in the bus lane and, therefore, get to their destination more easily and on time. This, in turn, would take pressure off the system.

I travelled to Belfast yesterday and I noticed a sign along the route approximately ten miles south of Belfast for a park and ride facility. It looked quite simple. Cars were parked in an open area and the commuters were able to get onto a bus or a train and continue to Belfast. What opened my eyes was coming out of Belfast at six o'clock. I only had to queue for a very short time to get onto the M1. Once I got onto the M1, the traffic flowed quite freely. We can compare that to trying to get out through Drumcondra or anywhere else in this city in the evening. If it can be done in Belfast, which is not in a foreign country or should not be to us in this day and age, why can we not come up with something simple like that? The bus lanes are there. There are plenty of private bus companies if Dublin Bus or Bus Éireann cannot deal with it. It would help to solve the problem dramatically and quickly.

I was fortunate enough to have been in cities like Chicago and Vancouver to name but two on that side of the water. They have overhead trams and underground tunnels in relatively new countries, yet we have failed to do that sort of thing in this city. It makes one wonder how we spent our time and money. A few years ago members of an Oireachtas committee visited Helsinki. We could not believe that we could get from one end of the city to the other in 15 minutes. We were never late for a meeting and never had to make any excuses. The services just run as they should do. We pride ourselves on having one of the best economies in the European Union and beyond at present, yet we cannot get the simple things right to make the structures more workable. Some of the older cities of Europe that have come through two world wars have been creative in dealing with their traffic problems through the use of tunnels and overpasses, yet we are still dealing with traffic lights. Why can we not make the simple things happen more quickly?

Those of us from Cavan-Monaghan depend totally on the road structure. We arrive in Dublin by the M1, N2 or the shambles called the N3, which the Minister knows better than most. We are looking forward to that road being improved sooner rather than later. If simple park and ride structures were put in place along the M50, it might even eliminate the problems on the M50 by stopping the traffic going back and forward along that route. It is now clearly recognised as the single biggest car park in Ireland rather than a transport route.

The Minister should reconsider the structures to run transport in Dublin. He must arrange that those appointed to do it are brought before a committee to ensure it is not a political structure. I suppose it is too late to ask him to do away with it altogether. Surely he will listen to some of the proposals made by Deputy O'Dowd. If it is not changed and remains as a totally independent structure that is not answerable to anybody, those who are spared and are in this House in the future will need to try to find ways and means to ask the Minister and his successors questions without the legal right to do so, which is unacceptable. While the Minister might regard it as a handy way out today, it is a dangerous road to go down. The NRA is responsible for the national roads that will lead into the area administered by this new transport authority. While it has been quite good to my area in Monaghan and we have a reasonably good road down there, Belturbet has sought a bypass for ten years. Many people have been killed in that area. However, when we raised issues with the Department of Transport in recent days, we could get no answers. That is the problem. These groups are not answerable to anyone.

The Minister has an opportunity to do some simple things right. I beg him to consider the use of the bus lanes as they are used in Canada. It would not cost the Government a cent. It is only a matter of working with the Garda and others that look after transport. That would ease some of the pressure. He should investigate the possibility of getting the use of fields or private parking structures to take the traffic out of the city by having park and ride facilities. As I said to the Minister before, if that can be done in Belfast along the M1, it is difficult to understand how it cannot be done in Dublin. The Minister must waste no more time. We are burning petrol and diesel, causing unjustified emissions and wasting time and money, because time is money. I have said this before but it cannot be overemphasised. There is an urgent need for these simple matters to be addressed.

Last, but by no means least, a number of years ago the Government promised many extra buses. I know money is scarce but surely there is a need, as Deputy Barrett said, to better utilise the double deckers available, or bring in extra buses, private or otherwise, to ensure the bus lanes are kept full. There is nothing as frustrating as sitting in a single car lane with a bus lane idle beside one. I have spent many hours like this. Today I enjoyed the sight of one little old lady who happily drove past all of us in the bus lane and eventually turned right at a junction. I tell this as a bit of a joke. She got away with it and we are glad she did. To see how she got out of the traffic chaos by using the bus lane shows how useful it can be. It was illegal and I will not give her registration number.

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