Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The greater Dublin area is being choked by a troika of policy failures. First, we have lopsided, rudderless spatial development, which is over-concentrating economic and population activity in Dublin and at the same time gutting regional Ireland. For example, more people leave County Meath every day to work than actually work in the county. No other county in the country has that experience. The M3 obviously goes both ways, but one direction is congested in the morning and the other side empty, and vice versain the evening-time. We have the shocking situation that there are farms within the M50 yet people travel from Cavan, Leitrim and Wexford to work in Dublin. A big problem with the transport situation is the lopsided spatial plan we have in this country.

Divestment in public transport is forcing people into private transport. The Minister's Government and the previous Government have taken hundreds of millions of euro out of public transport, leaving people only with the opportunity to use private transport. I mentioned infrastructure to the Minister earlier. We have a famine of infrastructural spend in this country, his Government being the second-lowest infrastructural spenders in the EU, second only to Romania. If there is an accident on the M50, which there regularly is, that road and all the feeder motorways into it can be completely like a car park for about two hours. That road is beyond capacity. I talked to him earlier about the Dublin-to-Navan rail line.

If the line was in operation, not only would people from County Meath get into the city quicker but approximately 15,000 cars would be removed from the capital's streets. As well as studying the route, a new feasibility study must examine the knock-on effects that opening the Dublin to Navan line would have on the rest of the Dublin network. The line will not open until 2045 at the earliest because the Government does not have a plan to do so.

The lack of continuous bus lines on all the radial routes into the city is a major problem because it causes buses to get snarled up in city traffic. I hope the Minister will address the absence of an orbital public transport service along the M50. People travelling to destinations in the city must first travel to the city centre before taking another public transport service outwards to their destination in Dublin. If I get to Blanchardstown off the M3 and need to go to Dunshaughlin or Swords, I should be able to take a bus to those destinations. The Minister's predecessor indicated that this type of service would be provided.

Cyclists are the poor relation in transport. I cycle into work every day and I often see mothers and young children on bicycles fighting for space on the north quays with heavy goods vehicles and double-decker buses. A cyclist's life is lost almost monthly on our roads.

There does not appear to be any plan to introduce electric, hybrid or biogas-fuelled buses, local authority fleets or taxis in Dublin. This is unlike cities such as Paris and Mexico, which are examining ways of removing diesel powered vehicles from the city.

I am sick of horizon politics, by which I mean the attitude that everything will be okay some day in the sunny future. I am sure the Minister is also sick of it. We are living with real difficulties now. Horizon politics is not new. A former Fianna Fáil Minister with responsibility for transport, Mr. Noel Dempsey, promised a train service to Navan by 2015 and we still do not have one. I ask the Minister to move beyond horizon politics. Rather than promise a shiny new future some day, he should ensure investment is made now.

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