Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I agree with some of the previous comments about NESC and its various reports. The last Government to introduce a substantive free-travel scheme on public transport was, of course, a Fianna Fáil Government in the late 1960s, when Charles J. Haughey was Minister for Finance, for those in receipt of the old-age pension. It has a radical impact on the quality of life and utilisation of public transport for those people. An evaluation of that scheme would be informative in terms of expanding it out because there is certainly an issue with public transport.

NESC has produced quite a few valuable reports on public transport, housing and climate change. What matters in this work is not the holding of media-focused events, but a real two-way engagement. A very clear piece of feedback from two years of the Government's new focus on marketing is frustration about how often State-funded events, billed as forums and consultations, are in fact little more than advertising roadshows with a preselected audience.

Last year the NDP roadshow involved a long series of events throughout the country, with many claims about what would be delivered, but no answers when hard questions were asked. No one was willing or able to answer the simple question about how decisions were made to choose between different options in expanding acute hospital services in certain locations and so on. I invite people to look back at all the projects announced at that roadshow and go through the more detailed work of trying to find out their status now, as I have done with various hospital projects that were announced but have not gone beyond the preliminary planning phase.

At national level we have a highly repetitive process where Government spends months trailing a new strategy in advance of its announcement. It then arranges a series of leaks promoting the key elements, followed by a stage-managed Cabinet event somewhere, presented as deciding on the strategy even though the advertising material is already printed - last week the Cabinet went out to the Technological University Dublin on the hybrid bus. There then follows a regional roadshow. The climate one was down in UCC. No one from the public can attend the UCC meeting; it is a selected audience. The Cork Environmental Alliance has been holding meetings for the past three years inviting all political parties, but which party was noticeable by its absence from all of them? The Fine Gael Party did not bother its barney turning up. I could not understand why it did not, but it did not. We then have showmanship in UCC.

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