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

I thank the Deputies for raising the issues. It was my initiative to secure €500 million additional and ring-fenced funding for the shared island agenda. Deputy Howlin, as a former Minister, will be aware that successive Governments since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and I am not casting aspersions on any specific Government, have only done some projects on canals and all of that. If only one Department is given responsibility for shared island projects, it will always find other projects that will come ahead of a North-South one and the idea of greater connectivity. That is unfortunate, but it seems to have been the reality. Inevitably, if design is slow or delayed, projects in this space can fall victim to that process. We are clear that this additional €500 million is ring-fenced for shared island projects.

All Deputies, including Deputy Ó Murchú, asked about projects, and I will come back to other issues. There are obvious projects that are in the Good Friday Agreement itself and the New Decade, New Approach document. We have been committing to the A5 for a long time and it is time to deliver. We will explore projects including Narrow Water Bridge, the Ulster Canal and the cross-Border greenway. We provided some initial funding for a greenway between Sligo and Enniskillen in the July stimulus package. We could make a lot of quick progress on greenways in different locations. We provided funding for the feasibility study on the Sligo to Enniskillen route.

We will look at the education area in the north west. We have not done a breakdown because, as we know, sometimes the worst thing that can be done for infrastructural projects is to hand over €50 million and then people go off designing the Taj Mahal and nothing ever happens. This has to be done in a robust way with proper design and procurement to make sure that a project can be realised and delivered on the ground and that the various local agencies and authorities are also playing their roles to accelerate a project so that we can make the contribution when it matters. We could, for example, make a contribution over three years, as the project is being designed and developed. It puts flesh on the bones of the shared island concept.

Connectivity is a key objective. For example, I can see us helping to fund feasibility work on faster rail connectivity between cities, North and South.

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