Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is worth going back to the early 1990s to consider when the Dublin Transportation Initiative, DTI, was put in place. I was a member of one of several consultative panels. The purpose of the DTI was to deal with traffic congestion in the capital and European funds were available for initiatives to deal with it. The case was very strongly made by Ireland at the time because Dublin was underperforming due to congestion. There were traffic delays, loss of productivity, increased accident rates, increased insurance costs and people's time wasted, among other issues. If anything, that case has got more extreme and it will not improve until key projects are in place and more people live in the city centre itself. The DTI reported in 1996 and set out what should be done. Not only did the report identify projects such as the DART underground, the Luas, metro north, a doubling of the Maynooth rail line and many other initiatives but it tested those pieces of infrastructure against population scenarios. The preferred scenario at the time was that there would be a population increase in the city centre and that was to be achieved through higher densities. Other growth scenarios were tested, including the do-nothing scenario, or leave it to the markets. The latter is pretty much what occurred. Fianna Fáil was in government for most of those years. It was all very well having a plan but when the plan did not match the growth scenarios, it was a mismatch. It is important to say that.

The very big projects include the DART underground that would connect the main rail lines and which has been described as a game-changer with the potential to treble rail capacity in the greater Dublin area to 100 million journeys per annum. All these years later, this project is still, largely, at the planning stage and the same is true of metro north.

It is well worth looking at the population changes between 1996 and 2016 in percentage terms. The Dublin Transportation Initiative had a 20-year horizon and it concluded in 1995 to 1996. It showed in graphic terms why we face such significant congestion. Over those 20 years Dublin city grew by just 13%; Dún Laoghaire grew by 13%; South Dublin grew by 22%; Fingal by 43%; Kildare by 39%; Meath by 44% and Wicklow by 28%. More people now live in the three counties of Kildare, Meath and Wicklow than live in Dublin city centre. That is what is called a doughnut. It is a typical American city that is car-dependent. We have created a perfect doughnut. While the DTI linked land use and planning when testing scenarios, clearly the city must be an attractive place for people to live, and that includes for families as well as individuals. One must look at apartment size, quality open spaces, good levels of security, investment in schools and good places to work.

One could ask what is occurring now and whether anything has changed. The growth experienced in the commuter counties is increasing. For example, Kildare is currently working through local area plans that include the development of 32,000 housing units up to 2023. If one assumes 2.5 people per housing unit, that is 80,000 extra people up to 2023. We are reinforcing the doughnut, which is absolute madness. The trend will add to the commuting demands and the national primary route will become a distributor route for the outer counties. The same is occurring in Meath and Wicklow as is occurring in Kildare. What occurs in doughnut-type cities is a demand for increased road capacity, calls for roads to be widened and new roads to be built. In that way one copperfastens the problem.

While we agree with Fianna Fáil on the need for capital investment, we believe it is short-sighted not to invest in capital projects in order to pay down the debt where they make absolute sense, which is the case with some of the projects outlined. In fact, we are convinced it will cost us more in the long run. We have climate obligations that will result in us paying hard cash when we should be investing that money in this hard infrastructure at this stage. We need to look at cities such as London that had the foresight in Victorian times to put in an underground, which has stood the test of time. There are plenty of other such examples.

Not only do we have a significant problem with congestion but we also have the climate obligations. We need more houses and apartments. However, let us not be so short-sighted that we resolve one problem and make another problem worse. Where the housing units are located is critically important. While an advisory council is useful it will not resolve the problem. It will take time to deliver big projects such as the DART underground and metro north and in the meantime interim solutions must be found to deal with the problem. We cannot separate land use from transportation planning. What we are doing at the moment is making a bad situation worse in terms of what is going on with the regional guidelines and I caution against that.

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