Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

I took the decision that because we could not afford to bring projects to construction, it was better to be honest and upfront about it, rather than stringing people along by spending millions on planning and the design of projects which we did not have the funds to construct. Unfortunately, Fianna Fáil still wants to play that old game. When it was in power, it spent more than €200 million on planning and the design of projects such as metro north, the M20 and the DART underground, among others, but it delivered none of them. I will not repeat its mistakes and seek to mislead people by telling them that their projects are alive by spending a few million here and there on planning. Rather, I have stopped work on the projects which have been deferred because there is no prospect of funding being made available for their construction in the foreseeable future.

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