Noel Rock (Dublin North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to see the House taking an interest in this issue. As a councillor and then Deputy for Dublin city, I have been raising this issue for some years. As a councillor I raised this issue many times with the city manager, the city manager being the relevant authority for traffic and traffic management in the city. The Government is certainly not to blame for the situation we have now. There are three chief architects behind traffic issues in Dublin. One is the economy, the next is the Luas cross city and the third is the Dublin city manager.

Starting with the Dublin city manager, the chief executive of Dublin City Council as he is known, was the manager in 2014 when my questions first emerged about how the city was equipped to handle the Luas cross city. I was the one asking these questions, therefore I should know his position on it at the time. It is clear that when it came to traffic management, the Dublin City Council body tasked with traffic management, the traffic advisory group, has somewhat failed in its duties. This is one element of the issue. The second is the Luas cross city, and that is self-explanatory for many people traversing from south to north and north to south, and I will return to this in due course. The third issue, as Deputy O'Rourke acknowledged, is the recovering and recovered economy. There has been no question that over the past two years we have seen more and more people commuting into the city, be it by private vehicle, by train from outer suburbs, by bus from inner and outer suburbs and by light rail, as we see with the Luas issues at present. Quite simply, this is a consequence of the recovering economy, and it is fair to say the recovered economy is one of the main drivers of congestion in our city.

The question now is how we manage it from here and how we balance the competing resources of private vehicles, private service vehicle such as taxis, buses, coaches, trains and light rail systems. Make no mistake, there is an issue coming which everyone hopes will resolve itself, but it will not. This is one of deploying limited resources and making tough choices. There can be no way the workhorse of public transport, the Dublin Bus network, with more than 50 routes traversing north to south through College Green, serving the entirety of my constituency and the north side beyond it, as far as number 33 to Balbriggan in my case, should be forsaken for one line serving one narrow portion of the north side of the city. It is clear when we make considerations and choices, and when we impress upon the city manager and the NTA the need to make these choices, we need to be canny and cognisant of the number of people that use each mode of transport.

It is quite clear that transport is always an issue in times of an improving and improved economy. Deputy Róisín Shortall distributed, and continues to distribute to this day, leaflets on traffic issues. They were distributed between 2005 and 2008 and they are being distributed again today. The reason for this is that traffic, transport and the built environment are becoming the predominant issues in Dublin city. It is no longer necessarily an issue simply of jobs and employment, which was the predominant issue from 2011 to 2016. Rather it is an issue of getting to and from work and getting one's own house. In my constituency of Dublin North-West, which is also Deputy Shortall's constituency, it is a relevant consideration because, as we have spoken about previously in the House, we are dependent on one mode of public transport. It is not the case like other constituencies that we have a light rail system as a secondary backup or a DART that can get us into the city centre. We are entirely dependent on the bus. I appeal to all who are listening, be it the National Transport Authority, NTA, the Minister, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, or the city manager, that due consideration must be given to these areas and constituencies when we are considering the main artery through the city. The north-west of the city must not be forsaken in this regard.

Regardless of the solution we chose to this issue, the issue itself is certainly not one of Government creation and we have certainly put a great deal of finance and resources into the transport network. I have full confidence and full faith that the Minister and his predecessors at the Department were and are fully committed to giving the public transport network the resources it needs to undo some of the congestion we see in Dublin city at present, which is a consequence of the improved economy we are in today.

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