Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It has been stated by some of my colleagues already that the problem is that we are starting from a bad place in that these PPPs have not delivered for the people, although they have delivered for the companies. Like everyone else here, I welcome the fact that we have a mitigation and that we have delayed the toll increases until June 2023. We were dealing with a huge amount of people who were making contact with us. As Deputy O'Rourke said, you are dealing with people who are paying multiple tolls each day as they travel for necessary dialysis and many other medical procedures. We are aware that haulage companies are under severe pressure. Medium-sized hauliers that are looking at dealing with three or four tolls, are talking about toll costs of between €100,000 and €130,000. These would be going up by €20,000 to €30,000, which is significant money. The idea of tolls was to free up traffic and to pay for maintenance. When we were first told about tolls, such as those relating to the East Link Bridge and the West-Link Bridge - before them we had the arrival of the M50 - the idea was that these would be short-term fixes for the projects to pay for themselves. That has changed and as has been said, the difficulty is that these PPPs did not deliver for people.

We can all talk about individual tolls, and I will talk about the M1. Deputy Munster spoke about the difficulty with the slip road in Drogheda, the huge cost that has and the impact it has on Drogheda. At this stage, because of the cost of tolls, we are dealing with a huge number of hauliers and others who are going through the towns that were meant to be bypassed. Again, we have not put together a sustainable means of delivering road maintenance. We all know that the people who are putting money into the M50 are paying for a considerable amount of road maintenance outside of the M50. I will return to the M1 and I will repeat the figure of €8.1 million, which are last year's pre-tax profits for the Celtic Roads Group for the M1. That is phenomenal money and we need a better and more sustainable solution. I could go on but my time is up.

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