Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Before I begin, I wish my good friend, Vicky Phelan, all the best given the news she gave us over the weekend. I am sure everybody in the House is thinking of her; I know I am.

Obviously, there was fanfare yesterday in Cork. It was a great local occasion for the Minister, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. I have been around when a number of these plans have been announced. I was probably involved in some of them. I have, however, never seen a launch of a national development plan, which aims to bring certainty to projects, actually create more uncertainty about their possibility than this one does. Even before it was announced, confusion abounded in the press conferences beforehand.

The Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, said this morning that none of the projects in the actual 160-odd pages are guaranteed but that it is more "a direction of travel". As the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, said there will be healthy competition between projects, that obviously means that all the projects are not going ahead. In reality, as my colleague, Deputy Nash, who is sitting behind me, said, this is more like a work of fiction. It is a wish list with no clear delivery for a huge range of projects.

What this plan actually means, when you break it all down, is that many transport projects must go through not one but two proofs by the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan. The first is that they will have to be climate-proofed and that is fair enough. However, they will also have to go through the new national investment framework for transport in Ireland, or NIFTI for short. That would prioritise future investment in land transport projects. I, along with my colleagues, think NIFTI is going to be quite shifty for the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Government, particularly for all the backbenchers present. When Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers want to know when a bypass, road or the M20 is going to be built, therefore, they will suddenly be staring into the eyes of the Minister for Transport and he will be getting very shifty about NIFTI-----

See this speech in context