Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The code the Minister is using and the price he is setting are not working. I will take a number of measures as evidence. The European Commissioner for Transport was over recently. She said that 90% of her budget goes on public transport in recognition of the fact that we have to decarbonise our entire transport system in record time. What do we have in this country? The national planning framework brings us back, by about two or three decades, to the same old model of roads, roads, roads. We do not have a single public rail project ready to go to tender. At the heart of that problem is the Minister's Department's lack of belief in public transport and renewable energy and its lack of belief that it has a role in taking action on climate change. I am sorry but something has to change. If the national capital plan, which the Minister will publish in coming weeks, is anything like the model of the national planning framework, we will be heading on a path to growing emissions and we will not be delivering the other social benefits which come with building a new, clean system of public transport. We are going badly wrong on climate and it is up to the Minister, as one of the key people involved, to turn it around. Will he change that code? Will he change the pricing mechanism? Something is badly wrong in his Department if it cannot see that a high-carbon future for transport, energy and agriculture is not the right thing for this country.

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