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

I was very hopeful and supportive of the process in terms of the national planning framework and aligning that with the national capital plan. I would have gone further and put our national climate mitigation plan together with those because I think all three should be connected. However, I have been very disheartened in the last five or six months. I was very disappointed with the draft plan when it was published before Christmas and I am even more disappointed now.

The plan started with the right key aspirations. First, all the documents and all the talk were exactly right in that the key mission was to try to switch away from the sprawling development seen across our State towards more compact settlements where people live close to their work and schools, and there is a real reduction in the cost of providing public services and quality of life for people. Second, this would be part of the transition to a low-carbon society which we know we have to make but at which we are failing terribly. This plan would give us a real opportunity, if we were to only grasp it instead of shying away from it, as we are at present. Third, it would provide a chance to have proper balanced regional development, not the madcap decentralisation approach that Charlie McCreevy took in the early parts of the last decade, but a real way of bringing life back into the centres of Limerick, Cork, Galway and Waterford as a way of counterbalancing the continued growth of Dublin. Last but not least, there would be the development of greater engagement by local authorities and regional authorities in this process in terms of how we prioritise projects, how we spend money and so on.

It is such an extensive document it would take more than the 12 minutes I have to address it properly but I want to set out some examples of where I think we have got it wrong in the final six months and, in particular, in the final document. I want to cite a couple of commentators who have spoken about this because I happen to agree with their analyses. I will start with John Moran, the former Secretary General of the Department of Finance. While I am not quoting him directly, I think he got it absolutely right in an article in last Sunday's newspapers that this was a compromised document. He said it was just protecting the status quoand that those behind it were not willing to be brave or to really think radically in terms of where we need to go from here.

Second, I want to quote Edgar Morgenroth of Dublin City University, who I believe was involved in the early stages of this plan. He makes the very valid case that by the continued overspending on new roads development and inter-urban motorways, we are not actually going to deliver the stated objective of building up urban cores. It simply does not work. What it does is to continue the doughnut tendency which we have seen in all of those graphic maps from ten or 20 years ago that show the number of people who are commuting long distances - the 250,000 people the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, referred to in his speech in the House, who are spending more than two hours a day on their commute and travelling 30 to 60 miles to our cities. That has to stop but it is not stopping. It is going to continue because we have compromised it by just investing in roads and by again, at the last minute, saying people can keep going with one-off housing, live in a house 30 or 40 miles out in the country and commute into the city every day. That is still where we are going. The figures are stark. Some 60% of the 500,000 houses we are expecting to build are to be outside the existing centres, either in greenfield, edge of town or edge of city sites, or further afield. However, they are expensive to develop and they are not achieving the key objective, which is to bring urban life back to the core.

When it comes to urban cores, the metro is welcome, although it is very late.

7 o’clock

It should have been commissioned in 2011 when it had planning permission and European Investment Bank funding and would have been the perfect counter-cyclical project. I am glad that it is being varied to include the connection to the south side, as was always the intention. However it is ten years late and it is not enough on its own. Dublin is in a transport crisis and it will only get worse as traffic continues to grow by 5% annually. The failure to advance the DART interconnector with any urgency, detailed planning or financial backing is a historic blunder. That project connects all the old railway lines. We have been looking for it since 1972 and recognised it was critical for an integrated public transport system. This Government has blown that opportunity. It is a terrible historic failing.Similarly, today, as Deputy Catherine Murphy noted, Transport Infrastructure Ireland was before the committee on transport. TII told us it had loads of road projects which were ready to go to tender. It is raring to go with all sorts of public private partnership roads. Members of IBEC are licking their lips for the public private partnership benefits that will go to them. This is a model we know well where certain road construction companies will do really well from this plan. Is there a single public transport rail project ready to go to tender? Not on your nelly, there is not. Nor is there any sign of any of the projects such as bus rapid transit or other bus connect projects, not only in Dublin but also in Cork, Galway, Limerick or Waterford. There is nothing. We seem to have an impassable inability to deliver public transport projects when we need them most. This plan does not favour those plans in the way it should if it wished to achieve the objectives that it set out at the beginning.

There was a Minister parading around talking about spending €58 million on greenways. That will probably get us the Dublin to Galway greenway if only we could get over the objections. The critical cycling infrastructure needed in Dublin today, the Sutton to Sandycove cycle route, or Bray to Balbriggan which is what we ought to be thinking of, the Liffey cycle route, the Dodder greenway, the Royal and Grand Canals, the Santry greenway are all projects that would achieve the objectives of creating really good compact living spaces. There is no impetus behind it. There is no support or priority given to it.

When it comes to the car-based system there is a need to think radically about where the trends are in cities that work. They are not going towards car ownership, but car sharing and innovative technological solutions that will bring us away from this car-based system. Fine Gael is just going with the status quo. It is the old thing where people have a three-bed semi and a car and have to drive for three or four hours each day, stuck in traffic in and out, because there is no way it will work. The Government could widen the N7 between Naas and Dublin to a 20-lane highway and it would still hit a standstill at the Red Cow. It will still jam as it is jamming today.

The Government is not developing compact cities and is not prioritising compact development. Nor is it sufficiently ambitious on low-carbon development. Paul Kenny from the Tipperary Energy Agency made a simple point to a committee here recently. He said that 60% of houses being built today are being built with fossil fuel heating systems. It is crazy. In 10 or 20 years' time they will have to be retrofitted at real cost. We have the alternative technologies in heat pumps which would help balance our renewable energy supply. We should move to that at a switch because that is where the world is going. The balancing capability with electric vehicles, heat pumps, and renewable power provides us with competitive play. We could already be doing it if we just said that we would stop burning fossil fuels.

The Taoiseach is out in Strasbourg acting as though he has nothing to do with how we are a terrible climate laggard. We are but if the Taoiseach meant to change it, the Government could make an immediate change to the big regulations to prohibit fossil fuels. If the Government was serious about climate change it would not countenance more fossil fuel power stations. We need to shut down Moneypoint and the peat-fired power stations. We cannot replace them with gas or fossil fuels and certainly not biomass, which is the least sustainable option of all. We have the potential. It sounds great to say that we have 3.5 GW of additional renewable power but we should do that in the Irish Sea alone. We should do an additional 2 GW of solar power and we should look to use Moneypoint as the connection point for offshore wind in the Atlantic which is now technologically and economically feasible. That is what is happening in other countries now, that is what they are investing in but we are not. We do not have the low-carbon ambition that we need to get us out of the laggard category and into the leadership one.

The thing which disappoints me most, and I think I have said it at every point of consultation or other process, is that this plan should have been a land-use plan to go with the national planning framework. We should look at 20,000 ha of forestry each year, not just the Sitka spruce monoculture clear-felling system. We should go towards a system using alder, rowan, ash and other indigenous forestry which we pay farmers for. It will help with climate, through the carbon store, and the money could go to the county where the tree is grown, but also protect biodiversity and creating a really wild Atlantic Way, which will cause floods of tourists to come here because it will be an attractive environment to visit. There is none of that ambition. The land-use plan is needed to go from the mountains to the sea so that we would manage our flooding system, our carbon storage and stop digging up peat which is the most valuable of carbon storage that we have, but there is none of that. How can we have a planning framework that does not plan our land? It is a terrible failing and a gap in this report.

On regional development, it is true that we need to develop Cork, Galway, Waterford, Limerick and Sligo and Letterkenny but we need to develop them in conjunction with Derry and think on an all-island basis. Similarly, we need to consider the corridor through Louth in terms of a Dublin-Belfast corridor. That level of strategic thinking is not evident here to compete against the northern corridor which the British Government is developing in the north of England. This plan fails where at the last minute, it says that the €1 billion regional fund can go to a whole range of projects. It should say that it is specific and has to go towards putting life back into high streets in every 19th century town in Ireland. They are dying. As John Moran has said, €1 billion is not enough. That should be exclusively what it is for and the towns and counties that would come up with the best solutions could be replicated elsewhere. Make them meet that challenge of restoring the 19th century towns. It brings life back into the towns rather than letting them die and it benefits the whole country. There is none of that.

On enhancing local powers, it is abundantly clear that we need a directly elected mayor of Dublin. Today at the transport committee we saw the usual thing where there are 40 agencies responsible for transport in Dublin, every one blaming the other. The buck needs to stop somewhere. It needs a mayor to manage this city and each of the other cities. I would like to have seen real powers being given and the allocation of money for those towns and for regeneration.

Finally, we need a cost rental housing model as the cities develop in order to get to a more unitary housing system, about which we will speak more in the coming weeks.

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