Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will take four minutes and leave two and a half to Deputy McNamara. I welcome the opportunity to speak but find it difficult not to despair at our inaction on climate change. I am totally on the Minister's side, as I said yesterday. We need to take urgent action. We declared a climate emergency on 9 May 2019. At the time, the then Taoiseach talked about that being symbolic and I am afraid that is what it has been. We were led by young children and declared a climate emergency through motions tabled by the Opposition.

I heard the Minister earlier and welcome the positive announcements about the western rail corridor. I understood him to say that the report is about to be published, though he can correct me if I misinterpreted him. The Minister will look at increasing capacity to allow commuter travel in Athenry and Oranmore.

I look at Galway city and it is crying out for vision. I am tired of the blame game. The local authority states it is starved of funding. The Government suggests that we have Monopoly money, billions to give out. Park and ride has never been rolled out in Galway notwithstanding that it has been an objective in the city development plan since 2005. One would imagine that some type of penalty would apply to the local authority for failing to act on its city development plan 15 years later.

As I mentioned last night, I recently attended a meeting with the officials in the county council and when they were asked about park and ride, they said that they were looking at a number of options but it would depend on the outer bypass. I have watched this cul-de-sac since 1999. All the eggs of management and the majority of councillors were put into one basket, namely, a road that was going nowhere.

All of the time we let the traffic build up in a way that is unsustainable. There is no park-and-ride or comprehensive school transport system. There is no connectivity with Connemara in any feasible or sustainable way with tickets that are affordable.

We have declared an emergency. The Minister was in opposition when he knew and supported our position, which was that we are not talking about the challenge of climate change. Rather, we are talking about a disaster and there is a tiny window of opportunity where we must take transformative action. To take transformative action, we have to lead.

On a practical level, where is the park-and-ride facility in Galway? The Minister should get on to the council, set a date and roll it out. Some 24,000 people signed a petition more than two years ago calling on the Minister to carry out a light rail feasibility study. Can he please commit to such a study? It fits in with the national development plan. There is wonderful language in that plan on sustainability, growing the footprint of Galway city by more than 40% and increasing the population to 120,000 by 2040. Let us do that in a sustainable way. Let us work together and develop the city in a sustainable way but not at the expense of Connemara, Kilmaine, Shrule or other areas. We must realise that development must be done in a sustainable way.

Before I hand over to my colleague, I want to support him and the other speakers who have mentioned Shannon. The airport in Galway closed and we accepted that as an inevitability at the time on the guarantee that the airport in Shannon would serve the region. We have not served the staff there very well during this pandemic.

See this speech in context