Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming in. Deputy Rock and I tabled this Topical Issue matter to discuss the pressing importance of this critical infrastructure, the metro, for Dublin. It is not just about my constituency, the inner city or Dublin Airport but the entire city. MetroLink is a project which is warranted and required by the city and will be seen in the future. We believe that the issues occurring on the south side relating to route selection will delay this project. The project is 45 years in the making. It was first suggested by Forfás in 1974 and if it was not for the economic collapse, it would probably have started by now. We have rough agreement on the proposed route alignment. While there will no doubt be some additional costs if we separate the programme, it will not be an extraordinary amount of money and it will not result in a substantial delay. It will perhaps be 12 months.

The construction of this project is scheduled to take five years so we need to get moving on it as quickly as possible. That is why both Deputy Rock and I believe that the project should be separated at St. Stephen's Green and the components which have already broadly been agreed can be delivered on in the coming years. That will require the National Transport Authority, NTA, to expedite its application for a railway order and get this project up and running. It is clear, given the extraordinary growth at Dublin Airport, which had 31 million passengers last year, with the second runway and the project for 50 million passengers in the next two decades, that it will require additional transport infrastructure to take the cars off the M50 and put passengers on trains and buses so they can go to the city centre and hop on the metro to get there in just 19 minutes. I implore the Minister to speak with the NTA and accelerate this project.

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