Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I had the pleasure of reading the plan over the weekend. It was tough going and there was a lot of repetition in it. I would probably have been better off reading some real fiction. The idea of long-term planning makes sense as we are all too aware that just about every Government in the history of the State has worked from election to election, with the vested interests of politicians in their own areas overriding the national interest. It is to be welcomed that the Government is taking a long-term view of where we are going and how we are going to spend our money in the next 22 years.

I found what I read to be high on aspiration but I do not see a lot of change. I welcome a plan which looks years ahead but I would have expected more on rail. I had an argument with someone in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport about a year ago about increasing the use of rail but I was told that, in the short term, it was not economically viable and one would have to look into the very long term to see a serious return on investment. I would have thought a long-term plan such as Project 2040 would have been kinder to the idea of rail.

I was amused by the last Deputy to speak, who wants rail before road except for in Cork. That is part of the problem we have in here. On "Morning Ireland" last week, Dr. Edgar Morgenroth said the Cork-Limerick road was not actually a great idea, and he was involved in the early stages of designing that plan. He said the original draft plan envisaged significant growth of the second tier cities, which is what is needed to anchor the economic activity in the weaker regions. He said that without big cities in the regions, those areas that are not close to Dublin are simply going to continue to do quite badly, and that is what they have been doing. He said that, in order to achieve this, it was important to put the infrastructure into the cities, not between them. We have built a lot of road in Ireland but we have not built a lot of rail. I was on a train from Turin to Milan at the weekend and it took 45 minutes, even though it is nearly as far as Dublin is from Cork. Rail is absolutely wonderful to use and one can get to Milan or Turin for €10.50, though it costs up to €15 for the faster train and it is a bit more if one does not book in good time.

Rail would be fantastic in this country. It is obviously not as economically viable as in a country with 30 million or 60 million people but just because we live on a small island and have a small population, we should not reject it. It is the way forward and if we were serious about addressing climate change we would do it. I found Project 2040 light on the issue of climate change and I do not see us taking the challenges seriously enough. We are talking about using biomass to supply energy instead of coal and turf but there are problems with biomass too and it will not tick the boxes over a period of time. The Government is not taking climate change seriously and if it does not address it in a plan which looks 22 years into the future, it is particularly worrying.

We have talked about housing here for so long that people are tired listening but that has not been addressed either. We are not addressing how we supply housing. Housing is unaffordable for too many people and I do not see any measures from the Government to address it. It will eventually deal with the supply element but I do not see it dealing with affordability. I do not accept that houses should be twice as dear in Ireland as they are in western Europe. It has become too big a problem for too many people as they try to put a roof over their heads. Some institutions have a cartel, particularly in Dublin, and since REITs came in we have turned a blind eye to NAMA selling all its property to them for peanuts. We took this issue up with the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, who spoke of the professional landlord taking over the market but it was always going to end in tears. The average rent for a two-bed apartment in Dublin is close to €2,000 per month, which is just nonsense. People cannot afford it and I do not see any proactive measures to tackle it. I have looked at every housing measure brought in by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government and the current Government and they are ignoring the fundamentals. They are sowing the seeds for the next crash, which is inevitable given the approach being taken.

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